For the past decade or more, a bevy of very powerful people have savaged our nation’s public schools while calling themselves “reformers.” It is perfectly clear that they have no desire to “reform” our public schools but to privatize and monetize them. The Bush-Obama era of “measure and punish” has not reformed our public schools but has plunged them into unending disruption, demoralization, and upheaval.
The so-called reformers have honed their PR message well. They couldn’t very well go to the public and say “with the help of some Wall Street billionaires and foundations run by billionaires, we have come to demolish your community’s schools and hand them over to corporations.” That wouldn’t play well. So they sold their goals as “reform,” even as they used the power of the federal government through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to close community public schools, to demean the teaching profession, and to make pie-in-the-sky promises about the wonders of choice. George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and other segregationists of their generation–the 1950s and 1960s–must be laughing in their graves to hear our “reformers”–even our Secretary of Education proclaiming the glories of school choice.
What should we call these people who want to destroy public education as a civic responsibility? The Status Quo. They control the U.S. Department of Education and most state education departments; they control federal policy. They control our nation’s biggest foundations–Gates, Walton, Broad, Dell, Arnold and others. They have the support of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Mortimer Zuckerman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as well as the editorial boards of major newspapers. They own NBC’s Education Nation. They ARE the Status Quo.
What do we call the millions of parents and teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members, and researchers who fight for democratic control of education? The Resistance.
We cannot be bought off or intimidated. We know that the strategies and mandates of the Status Quo have failed wherever they were tried. We fight for our children. We fight for democracy. We oppose segregation, budget cuts, high-stakes testing, closing public schools, rating teachers by student test scores, and labeling children by test scores. We will resist their bad ideas. We will resist their efforts to destroy public education. We will resist privatization. We will fight for a better future for all the children of our nation. We will not allow the Status Quo to monetize what belongs to all of us.
Calling ourselves “The Resistance” makes it sound like we’re primarily or even solely against something. Everyone I know who opposes faux school reform is for something critical to the fate and success of our country: A much better public education system. As an opinion writer covering positive and meaningful improvements to the U.S. system of education (you really should feature some of my articles every once in a while), I focus on the underlying purposes of public education and ways in which our public education system can be improved for the benefit of the students, not district administrators, politicians, and privatizers.
So maybe we could come up with a name that focuses more on the positive and less on the negative.
Peter, when your adversaries falsely advertise themselves as “reformers,” when they say they are for “students first,” when they say that the schools are overrun with “bad” teachers who must be replaced by inexperienced teachers, then the language has become so corrupt that Resistance is necessary. Yes, we are for Real Reform, but the word “reform” is now synonymous with closing public schools, firing teachers, taking away any due process rights for teachers,and applying a scorched earth policy to public education. I can write easily about what we are for, but words have lost all meaning in this time of verbal corruption.
amen
Diane, you of all people know what we’re up against on a daily basis in this fight. And I agree, just like many, many other positive labels used in other social issues, “reform” has been reshaped into a shibboleth for the anti-union, privatization-of-education movement (or, as I prefer to call it, the #FauxEducationReform movement).
And there is undoubtedly a lot of passion and strife embodied in the proposed name “the Resistance.” Regrettably, however, there’s no positive, over-arching message in that name. One of my fears is that in fighting with each of the various factions, each of which has proven extremely adept at mislabeling their opponents, the term “the Resistance” will be equally manipulated to describe “those people who are against progress; against making needed changes to public education.”
So I say let’s call the liars out, publicly, to be the liars that they are. Let’s paint the so-called “reformers” as the profiteers they most certainly are. Let’s reveal that the robber barons backing all of these destructive efforts in education are backing other anti-populist interests like opposing a minimum wage increase or equal pay for women, or taking away the vote from anyone who doesn’t have the “new and improved” documentation, so that the general public sees them for who they really are. The top 1/10 of the One Percenters whose sole goal is take control of almost every aspect of daily life because through control there is power and through power there is untold riches, as the expense of the 99%.
Let’s do all of those things and more to open people’s eyes. But after doing that, let’s have a positive message for what we stand *for,* and let’s have a name to go along with that; one that reflects our core beliefs and not just that we’re against something or someone.
Peter, this requires unequivocal, absolute Resistance:
http://www.commoncoremovie.com/
Isn’t the movie incredibly powerful? This is the second time I have watched it and won’t be the last. I plan to pass the link on to my local school board. I can still remember one of the board members asking not long ago what the Common Core actually is and who wrote it. He received the canned politically correct answer about 45 states blah, blah, blah. I find it incredibly scary that my school board is so clueless; they are bright, savvy people.
I’m not sure about “the resistance.” I think that’s fine for parents. For educators, it too much looks like resistance to improvement. The “reformers” have created a false dichotomy that you are either for the Common Core and all that comes with it, or you are for keeping everything the same. To me (while I’m all in with this movement), “the resistance” feeds into the “reformer” narrative.
Just one teacher’s thoughts.
Thank you!
I emphatically disagree.
Let them make this spurious claim that we oppose “reform.” Let us wear their opprobrium as a badge of honor. The more the deformers cackle about our opposition to their “reforms,” the more press we thereby get.
It’s time we stopped allowing them to define the terms of the debate. Enough of their Doublespeak. We reject that ours is resistance to reform. It is resistance to deform. And resist we must. Too many have been cowed. Too many are afraid to speak their minds about this. We need clear, unambiguous language.
We need to make clear that there is a resistance to education deform, that we are not willing to collaborate with child abuse, with the creation of a totalitarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat, and with the dismantling of public education.
Bob, your argument is fine when your preaching to the choir, but it doesn’t hunt beyond that.
Yes the reforms are not good, but why? How do they conflict with what good education should look like?
We can do better than sounding like Fox News. And sometimes we do. Just with a different pov.
Respectful disagreement, Bob, and I very much appreciate everything you bring to this site (and I’m sure elsewhere). I agree with Peter’s reply. There’s a reason teachers have no influence in this debate. We’re considered by many to be THE problem, and I believe that “the resistance” feeds into that. Resistance can easily be twisted to “resistance to improvement,” “resistance to actually working,” or “resistance to any and all accountability.” I don’t think we want to go there.
I have to agree with Peter and Ohio Algebra. You are right, Bob, to name what we are up against, but we need to provide the alternative narrative woven into our critique. I know that we know the alternatives, and you have presented your vision on many occasions, but we need to consistently flesh them out with real instances of their power.
How many times have you seen a frazzled adult dealing with a child who has lost control not with compassion but with determined doubling down on discipline? We have a false narrative that says our public schools are filled with students who are not learning and, in many instances, are out of control. What do the deformers present but a plan to doubledown on schools, teachers and students essentially saying, “You will perform, dammit!” Just as with the recalcitrant child, there are ways to redirect the conversation to more effective ways of avoiding or defusing what is essentially a power struggle. In this situation, we need to be the adults who, rather just reacting to the problem, push an agenda that is built on our expertize as educators.
Can you imagine a kindergarten teacher standing in the middle of the class screaming at his or her students to sit down and do their work? The deformers are screaming at all of us to sit down and shut up. We had better have a more effective way to deal with them.
never2old, I have some ideas up my sleeve. I have been thinking nonstop about THE ALTERNATIVES lately because that’s what people need to see. What unCommon education might look like. Networks, open source, an ecology instead of a monoculture. I want to start building that. With tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions of others. The totalitarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat or that? No question which people will buy into. Wikipedia, not Encarta.
Interesting discussion about the terms of debate — but I like Resistance despite all these cogent points about how the term can be turned against teachers and parents — but what terms cannot be so abused? Resistance has very powerful historical connotations that are entirely appropriate here. Autocrats almost always think they are acting in the best interests of the people. And they never give up power voluntarily.
The essential point here is that the deformers are attacking our democracy at its most fundamental level — the cradles of free and informed thought that are our public schools. What do you call fighting such an assault other than resistance? Let’s get historical resonance into the debate, and then point out that — it’s about democracy, stupid!
They never give up power voluntarily. They must be resisted.
Peter Smyth: I have long enjoyed your posts. But I think that it is precisely when we are not preaching to the choir that we need to be very, very clear about this, that we are resisting a truly Orwellian takeover of U.S. education. What we have seen is just the beginning of something that will completely undermine democracy.
Leave it to Diane to write “The Second Declaration of Independence.Hoorah! “…We call these truths displayed here to be self evident. And therefore, We, the representatives of the public schools of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the judgment of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these United States, solemnly publish and declare, That these schools are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent from Federal and Corporate influence; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the U.S. Department of Education, and that all political connection between them and the Taxpayers, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent, they have full Power to determine their own Programs of Education, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent schools districts may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Reason and Justice, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
I hereby sign my name to that. And make it large enough that Arne, Bill, Michelle, Jeb, and the rest can read it without their spectacles!
They can read????
I agree with Ohio Algebra II teacher. Just being against something, no matter how vile or nefarious it may be, just isn’t enough. Everyone I know who is against what I like to refer to as the #FauxEdReform movement is also very much for its antithesis: A better and more-effective education benefiting students.
As a frequent opinion writer on education reform (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-smirniotopoulos/), most of what I’ve published (with this exception:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-smirniotopoulos/war-on-education_b_1348323.html) has been about how to improve public education and why doing so matters. It’s much easier to criticize something than to offer a preferred alternative.
So how about we come up with a name or label that better reflects what we’re for and doesn’t focus exclusively on what we’re against?
So if there are just privatizers and resisters, in your opinion, are there in fact no reformers? Is it a perfect system in need of no change? Or it needs change, but nobody stepping up? I think this is where your blanket painting of all reformers with the same brush takes away from the credibility of your statements.
It’s Orwellian to refer to the meager changes that reformers have accomplished in the last decade as the “status quo”. I see very little change to the system as a whole. I don’t think anyone believes that except in the echo chambers of forums like these (reminiscent of the effect Fox News has on their viewers).
To me, the top down accountability and testing are a reaction to a complete lack of bottom up accountability. If teachers and administrators could figure out how to work together for the betterment of students and the improvement of the professions, they wouldn’t be getting these terrible solutions forced on them. Time and again opportunities for developing these systems and getting buy-in has been squandered, and the result isn’t no system, but either the continuation of something ineffective or the legislative mandate of some very poor substitute.
Why don’t we have a nuanced system of ongoing teacher development and evaluation? Because teachers have insisted for years that there are no differentiations between teachers despite everybody knowing that is patently false.
Why do we have the blunt instrument of NCLB and schools being held accountable to state tests? Because there is nothing else in it’s place for the evaluation and improvement of schools. Why not be fighting to growth against projected growth on evaluative assessments? That would be something in the teacher and students best interests, and also give the public what they need to see that their dollars are well spent. Something like this needs to be complex and take many factors into account, but if the education profession isn’t creating it, who will?
Unfortunately, I don’t think resistance is going to have the desired effect since the need for accountability is too strong. Engagement would do it, but there seems to be more interest in further polarization. As I’ve mentioned before, it’ so easy to see what everyone here is against; not so easy to see what they’re for. I don’t think encouraging “opt out” is going to improve testing or make it go away.
There’s not even a unified voice among resisters, as some don’t like common core standards, some don’t like the available aligned curricula, some don’t like the implementations, and some don’t like the assessments. I think the public is just hearing “don’t evaluate us on how our students do”.
I think that what the public wants to see is a little bit of humility about teaching and learning, and some reality about good teachers, excellent teachers, and the few bad ones. Without that, there is no engagement and little hope for improvement of how education is perceived.
In Finland, the adults in the building cooperate in the best interests of students, and teachers are drawn from the top college performers. If we had those two things in this country, the public wouldn’t feel the need to create all of these things that resisters are fighting. Who’s fighting for that?
Good letter at: http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/is-significant-school-reform-needed-or-not-an-open-letter-to-diane-ravitch-and-like-minded-educators/
ITA; very well-said. This, in particular, resonates:
“To me, the top down accountability and testing are a reaction to a complete lack of bottom up accountability. If teachers and administrators could figure out how to work together for the betterment of students and the improvement of the professions, they wouldn’t be getting these terrible solutions forced on them. Time and again opportunities for developing these systems and getting buy-in has been squandered, and the result isn’t no system, but either the continuation of something ineffective or the legislative mandate of some very poor substitute.”
Those of us who are truly interested in genuine reform–who recognize that we need a paradigm shift in public education–must organize a better, alternative narrative in response to the #FauxEducationReform movement characterized by privatization and top-down standardization.
So let’s see if everyone can rally around a positive message of what we want public education to become. Just labeling ourselves “the Resistance” may be a recipe for failure.
Peter, this is a bit of resistance to the Common [sic] Core [sic]. Please note that it concludes with a discussion of alternatives. Not one, but many alternatives. Not a monoculture imposed by some self-proclaimed “reformer” but an ecology made up of independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and teacher/practitioners.
psmirn,
A couple of things.
“We’re in a political climate where merely resisting something without offering a positive and coherent message of what we’re for is a losing proposition. . . . That’s not to say we should not resist changes to the public education system we believe are actually harmful. But we much represent more than just fighting change.”
First one has to identify the those “actually harmful” practices and expose them for what they are. I have chosen to identify and highlight the inherent epistemological and ontological errors that render the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing completely invalid. Start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity. These malpractices cause multiple harms to students, and now with VAM teachers, schools and districts. Since there are new readers everyday I try to highlight Wilson’s work* often.
Yes, it’s only “against” those malpractices but I make no claims as to what “everyone” should do instead of them. The general population, but especially teachers and administrators must understand why the nefarious practices of educational standards and standardized testing are logically bankrupt. And, for me, that is the primary focus of my resistance.
Perhaps you would like to do an article for Huffpo on the complete invalidity of these malpractices so that more can understand the insanities that are thrust upon the children. Let me know, I’d be more than happy to help you. You may contact me at: dswacker@centurytel.net
*“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I wanted to repeat something that Peter Smythe said here. It is simply and beautifully said and a great truth:
Deep, rich content knowledge is not sufficient for good teaching, but it’s a necessity.
total hogwash
There have always been systems of accountability in our schools. Our schools have been ecologies, not monocultures.
Bob, public education is the poster child for mutually assured non-accountability.
You can’t appropriately hold anyone accountable for something they have no influence over, do you agree?
So, if a principal can’t pick teachers, how can you hold them accountable? If a teacher can’t decide the best way to spend time with a challenged student in classroom, how can you hold them accountable?
When 98% of teachers get rated “satisfactory”, where is the accountability? When job protections keep teachers that are abusive to students on the job, where is it? When a teacher wants to stay after school with a student and gets told they’d better check with the union rep first? Where then?
I think there are lots of good historical reasons for why education in the US looks like this, but it has to change.
Very well-stated.
Hindsight being 20/20, internal resistance to much-needed change has been #FauxEducationReform’s biggest ally in gaining traction with pols and parents alike and against the teaching profession. We need a different mindset going forward if we’re to succeed in wresting control of public education from the profiteers, especially the national testing companies, and put it back in the hands of educators.
“You can’t appropriately hold anyone accountable for something they have no influence over, do you agree?”
Sure you can. School administrators do it all the time. Why, think of our current fascination with standardized test scores. Schools and teachers are held accountable for student scores even though research shows that the most accurate prediction of a how a student will perform is their socioeconomic background. We even rank our students and make high stakes decisions on the basis of data far removed from the classroom.
“So, if a principal can’t pick teachers, how can you hold them accountable?”
I don’t know about your schools, but in my local elementary school district the Superintendent and school board make the final decision on staffing after vetting by teacher committee and the principal. The principal is responsible for ongoing supervision and mentoring. He/she has four years to decide whether a teacher is effective before they are eligible for tenure status. Four years of at will employment seems like sufficient time to weed out the truly inept.
” If a teacher can’t decide the best way to spend time with a challenged student in classroom, how can you hold them accountable?”
This question hits home personally. You can hold teachers accountable for implementing the school’s program, but you as a supervisor are responsible for providing support in making your program successful. (Ha!) Teachers today had better document their activities obsessively if they want to keep a job in an environment that demands adherence to a set program. In the end, I have yet to find a school administrator that couldn’t get rid of a teacher they did not like. I would like to see figures on the number of teachers who retain their jobs after dismissal by a district. I would hazard a guess that no probationary teachers are retained since they are at will employees.
“When 98% of teachers get rated “satisfactory,” where is the accountability?”
Since the attrition rate for teachers is so high in their first five years, what kind of turnover is reasonable to expect? Have you disaggregated this data beyond a nebulous global percentage? How about in your own district? How many teachers are let go per year for being ineffective? How many choose to resign rather than being fired? As we have seen with the PISA data, we need disaggregate the data to find information that might be useful.
“When job protections keep teachers that are abusive to students on the job, where is it?”
It is not job protections that keep such teachers on the job. Look to the administration.
“When a teacher wants to stay after school with a student and gets told they’d better check with the union rep first? Where then?”
Union rules like administrative rules can get ridiculous especially when they neglect those who they are supposed to represent . Sometimes they get overzealous in their protection of worker rights. I agree that there should be expeditious ways to deal with the union’s superseding of individual rights of the teacher. To be fair, I only ran into this situation in large urban districts. In the smaller suburban districts I worked in, no one interfered with a teacher’s putting in their own time with a student. It was usual for students to come early or stay late or even during a teacher’s lunch break..
Am I arguing for a stagnant culture? No! Education by its nature should evolve. If we are truly lifelong learners, than change is inevitable. Managing it is the beast.
“This question hits home personally. You can hold teachers accountable for implementing the school’s program, but you as a supervisor are responsible for providing support in making your program successful. ”
Exactly. If I tell you what to do, I can only hold you accountable for whether you do it or not. Whether it gets results is on me. If I say that certain classified students will be in a classroom structured with x teachers and y aids for z minutes per day, I have taken away the professional aspect of teaching.
This is the tradeoff that I don’t see the profession making. If teachers and administrators won’t take ownership for results, they will continue to get highly proscripted “solutions” and will only be held accountable to work rules.
Teachers want more responsibility, and they should absolutely have it, but it only comes with some measure of accountability.
I don’t know of anywhere where teachers are held to absolute measures of student performance as opposed to growth measures that at least try to account for external factors. IMO, the profession should be trying to improve such measures instead of insisting that no measures at all are valid.
jpr,
If I had a doughnut shop, my doughnut makers would ALL be satisfactory. Why? Because if they weren’t, if I had a doughnut maker who was not satisfactory, I would get rid of him or her. If a principal has a relatively stable group of teachers, why wouldn’t they ALL be satisfactory? Why would she keep a teacher who wasn’t?
The Deformers have sold the country on the notion that we have lousy teachers. We don’t have lousy teachers. If you correct for SES, our teachers’ students have the highest performance or close to the highest performance, in the world on the very tests that the Deformers point to as their most treasured measure of performance.
Beware people and their uniform measures of teacher quality. There are many, many ways in which to be a great teacher.
I am, myself, a fan of peer evaluation and of teacher-led schools. If it were up to me to make changes, nationwide, to improve teacher quality, I would make these:
1. I would empower teachers, at the building level, to choose their own curricular progressions, pedagogical techniques, lesson models, frameworks, and materials. Empowered, autonomous people perform better and rise to the levels of responsibility accorded them.
2. I would institute programs of peer evaluation in all schools. Every teacher would be evaluated by several peers, and outlier evaluations would be thrown out.
3. I would create time in teachers’ schedules for Japanese-style lesson study, making it a key component of the job that they take a considerable amount of time each week to meet with other teachers, go over what worked and didn’t work, share what they are doing, and talk through lesson plans for the following week. Teachers in such situations can and will identify and help toward improvement those who are weakest. As has been dramatically demonstrated in quality control in industry, real continuous improvement flows from the bottom up, not from the top down, from line workers with the authority to implement real change.
4. I would pay teachers a lot more because you get what you pay for. And gradually, over time, I would raise scholarly barriers to entry to the profession
5. I would require extended periods of mentoring by peers before the status of teacher was granted. After that time, teachers would have real tenure, not the ersatz eunuch’s shadow of tenure that some still have today
6. I would create a wall between administrative and teaching functions. Administrators would deal with facilities and like matters. Teachers would be governed by teacher-leaders chosen from among their own and subject to recall by their peers.
7. I would require an IEP for every student.
8. I would create an IEP committee for every student consisting of the student, his or her parent(s) or guardian(s), a counselor, and a couple of teachers.
9. I would create a mechanism for bi-weekly sharing by teachers with the entire school of performance portfolio pieces by their students.
10. I would create district-level continuous teacher education programs focused on new learning in teachers’ content areas and review of research into the cognitive psychology of learning.
In short, I would make teaching a highly respected, highly skilled, highly autonomous profession. In a few years’ time, under such a plan, no idiot politician would dream of presuming to issue bullet lists telling teachers how, what, and when they should teach.
Bob, I think you’re missing a lot of factors in the “satisfactory” game. If you had a doughnut shop and made lousy doughnuts, nobody would come to it, so you would actually care about your employees being satisfactory. You’d be invested in the quality of your outcomes in a way that administrators generally aren’t, and you’d have much more control over who you hired or fired. Finally, you still might be disappointed in the talent pool.
I object to the “all teachers are great” meme just as much as I’d object to someone saying all were lousy. Do you think it’s an issue when math teachers can’t pass math tests a couple of grades above what they’re teaching? We have the teaching force that we have, and I believe it could be better.
Once I got past that, I actually agreed with most of what you said. I believe 100% in building-level control and the team effort that you’ve described, and I’ve found that to be the case with high performing charters, most of which (despite deniers claims to the contrary) are started by educators who think they can do things better. If I didn’t know the context that I read this in, I’d think you’d be perfect for the job ;-).
No. I absolutely do not approve of having math teachers who know very little math. I have taught alongside Algebra teachers who knew less mathematics than I do, a French teacher who would read the next chapter to learn what her kids were going to be studying the next week and who could neither read nor write French. But such people are fairly rare. That’s why I said that we should gradually, over time, raise scholarly barriers to entry to the profession. Teachers should know their subjects. They should have a profound command of their subjects. But that command should not be identical from teacher to teacher. I know great statisticians who would be at a loss as geometers. We must not create some monolithic measure of competence. We should be encouraging wide diversity in competence.
jpr, there are such schools, teacher-led schools that are amazing.
We used to have a lot of public schools like that in the U.S. At one time in this country, there was a raging debate over the relative virtues of building-level autonomy and district control. The districts won that. Then the states. And finally, now, the feds. We need to REVERSE ALL THAT.
re: can’t pass math tests a couple of grades above what they’re teaching?
Yes, I STRENUOUSLY object to that. It’s extremely important that teachers of a subject have, themselves, a vista far beyond what’s in the syllabus. When that fascinating topic comes up that isn’t in the syllabus, the teacher needs to be able to follow the lead, exploit the teachable moment, can the curriculum and do the exciting thing. But here’s the biggest reason why I think content expertise important: What teachers should most be, for their students, after being compassionate and caring, is PASSIONATE MODELS OF WHAT IT IS TO BE A LIFELONG LEARNER. Kids should be saying to themselves, “Wow. I want some of that. I want to know what this person know, to see what he or she sees. I want to take that trip he or she has been on because it is WAY COOL, WAY INTERESTING. A person who knows little of luthery or dirigible driving is not interesting to learn from on the subject of luthery or dirigible driving. But someone who is a master of either will hold almost anyone spellbound when discussing it.
A good example for extended math is in math. Fractions are the beginning of the powerful ideas of ratio and proportion,which carry through middle school to Algebra as slope and later as rates. And of course probability.
Fourth grade teachers don’t teach these, but they need to understand the big ideas they are laying the foundation for.
I have always followed the principle that if that person is ready to ask the question, he or she is ready for at least the beginnings of an answer. I think that too often in math, in particular, the teacher is not someone who does mathematics recreationally, keeps up with it, has a head stocked full of fascinating applications beyond the book. Give me the teacher who can say, “An algorithm is just any really dumb procedure, and then rattle off six or seven very distinct examples, in various fields–algorithmic, nonalgorithmic. There’s someone with the moniker MathVale, who shows up here from time to time, who seems to have just the sort of well-stocked mind that is, I think, ideal. Why is he or she like that? Well, this person is CRAZY ABOUT MATHEMATICS. Loves it. Is a practitioner of mathematics in his or her own life.
When students are surveyed about what makes a great teacher, genuine caring for their students and a passion for teaching generally, and their subject matter specifically, rank at the top.
Perhaps this is naive but if by the time a student reaches the 2nd or 3rd grade (and please don’t scoff at this notion, because there are plenty of brain and character development studies showing how much of a student’s disposition toward learning is fixed by age five) they had intellectual curiosity and an interest in learning–the dual desire to both ask the questions and then seek to answer them–and, another big if, after that the system of education didn’t operate in a soul-crushing manner that tested those dual desires right out of those young learners, almost everything else that matters would fall into place.
So, Bob, while I like a lot of what you’ve proposed for how teaching could be improved–making it teacher-centric–I would take the next step and argue that all teaching should be student-centric, with the primary challenge for each and every teacher being how to take the subject matter in each case and deliver it in a manner that sparks intellectual curiosity and fuels a further passion for learning.
Standardization does not lend itself to any of that, of course. Quite the contrary.
psmirn,
You have delightful ideas. I just want to offer, if you will allow me to do so, one bit of advice. Don’t say really, really obvious stuff to very highly experienced educators as though such things had never occurred to them before. How many people do you think believe that education should NOT be student-centric? Do you imagine think that wanting teachers to know their subjects is somehow incompatible with wanting education to be student-centric? If so, explain the incompatibility, for that would be something truly astonishing to me, something I never would have imagined. Go back and reread what I said above: I said that the most important thing, AFTER the teacher’s compassion and care, is that he or she is himself or herself a learner. Look back over my posts on this blog for the past year. The entire driving force behind my opposition to the Common [sic] Core [sic] is my understanding that students differ and invariant bullet lists do not. I have written VOLUMES on that topic on this blog and elsewhere and in over a hundred books over thirty years’ time.
I am saying this because you are joining this dialog at a time when every experienced educator in the country has had his or her belly full of amateurs like David Coleman and his ilk telling them the blindingly obvious as thought those educators weren’t capable of tying their own shoelaces. No, David, we never read substantive texts before. We just read the backs of cereal boxes. And no, we never looked at texts closely. We tried holding them up to the light, but we couldn’t see anything. Just black marks on paper. We did have these dreams about having spent hundreds of thousands of person hours analyzing texts with kids. But since you’ve just discovered that, David, we must have been hallucinating.
Really, I liked your stuff. I am a big fan of Robinson and of the divergent thinking research. But when I and others on this blog write of these matters, we generally do so based on careful consideration, over decades, of the positions that we hold, and we’re generally pretty careful about expressing what we say. And so don’t read us with simplified, received notions about what we are saying. Read what we say. And think about it. I and many others here have been teaching and doing research and planning curricula and writing books for kids and teachers for many, many decades. We are happy to join in discussion of our varying views and even to engage in heated debate. But don’t blithely offer me and other people here these simplistic corrections. What you have written here is the equivalent of explaining the germ theory of disease to a physician. You should know that that’s what it sounds like. Warm regards to you, sincerely, and thank you for your interest in helping to stop the centralization, regimentation, and standardization of K-12 education in the United States.
Wow, Bob. In the words of Goldmember, “there’s no pleasing you.”
You express something clearly in the form of your personal opinion, and I support that personal opinion letting you know that actual surveys of students corroborate it.
You offer a solution that’s clearly teacher-centric and I reinforce it with the qualification that all teaching be student-centric.
Pretty much everything you’ve contributed to this thread, at least as related to your responses to my contributions, evidences my worst fears about Diane’s suggestion that the group embrace the moniker “the Resistance.” You’re so convinced that you have all the answers that your stock response is “read what I’ve already said,” as if no one’s ever had an original thought since you.
For my part, this exchange, particularly with you, has convinced me that this blog and the group that follows it is not the right vehicle in which I should invest my time in fighting against the corporate take-over of public education. There’s clearly no room here for anyone who hasn’t read everything you’ve ever written and, after having done so, doesn’t agree with you 100%. Basically, everything that’s wrong with teaching today.
Peter, that you’ve come recently to this blog and see the same things I see, is disquieting confirmation.
It started as a platform growing out of Ravitch’s last book. It was insightful and usually measured. It seemed about moving education forward.
But it seems to have hardened into an us vs them thing, forgetting that “us” has to win over the uncommitted and uninformed. We hear words like “deformers” that do nothing to win people over. People seem to rather be loud and vocal than actually win the battles.
There are billionaires, politicians, and assorted bad people. But there are also a lot of good people out there going to work each day are actually implementing the Common Core, trying to figure out how to continue to get good teachers into the profession, even trying to raise test scores. We see the fallacy of these attempt, but we don’t score points by telling them that everything they’re doing is a sham.
We only win by opening clear paths forward out of the mess. My local superintendent has cast her lot with the goals of raising test scores and graduation rates, even implementing VAM based evaluation. She needs a way out of this, a better place to take schools to. But to do that she needs a critical mass of people who get that vision. We haven’t created that. Yet.
On tenet of the Cowboy Philosophy, is “When you’re out there in front leading the herd, it good to look back to see that people are following you.”
How do we have conversations with actual parents of actual children in reasonably decent schools? I can’t just tell my daughter that the math my granddaughter is getting doesn’t hack it. I have to convince her what good math really looks like.
Again, I did not offer a “teacher-centric” solution. I simply said that teachers need to know their subjects. And my entire argument, here and elsewhere, against Education Deform is based on the fact that students differ and one-size-fits-all standards do not. And far, far from wanting to impose MY ideas on everyone else, I have called for an open-source wiki of competing, voluntary frameworks, standards, and so on and for the end to all top-down mandates in education, for individual and local autonomy, for allowing teachers to take back their profession.
You came onto this blog talking about how we all have to embrace the need for reform because our kids are falling behind the rest of the world. This is the standard Ed Deform line, and it’s completely false, as a review of Richard Rothstein’s research will demonstrate to you. Our schools are not failing. And no one here is against reform. I and many others are very much against completely inexperienced people presuming to have the answers for everyone else. That’s the modus operandi of Ed Deform. At it’s hurting a lot of teachers and kids, every day, right now, and there are many of us who intend to resist this intrusion.
Bob,
I think you’re choosing parts of Rothstein’s research.
These are from the “conclusions” section of that report. Admittedly, I’m choosing specific items that counter your contention that PISA says our schools are doing well, but that’s my purpose.
In Math,
– U.S. students in all social classes perform less well than comparable social class students in the top-scoring countries.
In Reading,
– Disadvantaged students perform…substantially less well than disadvantaged students in the three top-scoring countries.
– The reading achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in the United States is… larger than the gap in the top-scoring countries.
I also object to the notion that test scores should only be compared by SES even if countries have radically different percentages of SES levels. I don’t say that it isn’t valuable to look at that way, but it can’t be the only consideration. It’s like saying “if only we had the students we wish we had, we could compete with other countries”.
Everyone SAYS they want student-centric education, but few really do. Why can’t they deliver it, then. It’s a power trip. They want to be the ones in the room who know (by virtue of having the answer book not by virtue of their own education and intelligence).
exactly, Harlan. Ira Shor has written beautifully about his very challenging experiences actually trying to take the notion of student-centric education seriously. We’ve build a system that from Day 1 trains lab rats. Most students, in a situation in which it’s up to them, unsurprisingly, say WTF? They are looking for someone to put them through paces, as everyone else does. Derrick Jensen also writes well about this in Walking on Water.
I should have said, I suppose, yes, the primary challenge is to fuel a further passion for learning. I would quibble with the implication of “take the subject matter.” There should be no “the subject matter.” There are broad subjects, and many, many roads within these. There are varied students. The challenge is to assist that student in finding a passion and pursing it in a substantive, transformative way. The Ed Deforms are seeing ed tech as a means for mechanizing learning. I see it as yet another means–an extraordinarily powerful means–for diversifying and truly individualizing and personalizing learning. There is no reason why a student interested in boats or sailing, for example, couldn’t learn most of the K-12 mathematics curriculum in relation to that. Same for the student interested in metal working or woodshop, computers, or graphic design.
The Ed Deformers want “one size fits all.” I want schools that enable young people to create themselves, uniquely.
Now, on this approach, I completely agree Peter S.
I don’t recall passing along the “all teachers are great” meme, jpr. And yes, generally, my association with the The Resistance to Education Deform does not enable me to feed at the great Deform trough. If I had no scruples whatsoever, there would be a great deal of money to be made from THE 21st-century Investment Opportunity, as a recent Edupreneur Investor’s conference invitation put it. Oh, there is a mighty river of green flowing from the Plutocrats’ pockets these days.
This is a pretty good list, Bob
Thank you. I know that to many it sounds like magical thinking. But I have seen it work. Think of serving on a jury. I’ve done this three times now. Each time, a group of very disparate people, of every conceivable description, almost, rose to the occasion. Hand them the solemn responsibility. Make it theirs, and they take it very, very seriously. People are like that. They are intrinsically motivated. Ed deformers don’t understand that. It’s a basic misunderstanding of what makes people tick. There are popular writers on this topic now, Daniel Pink, for example, and there’s a lot of solid research. Extrinsic punishment and reward is demotivating for cognitive tasks.
For several years, I worked as a quality control consultant because I took an interest in the field. So I studied all that literature. And what one finds, there, is that when you give line workers the autonomy and responsibility, when you make quality control THEIR job, not the thing imposed by the boss, they vastly outperform expectations. There’s an enormous literature there, a practical literature, born in actual experience in industry on the job.
Bob,
The ed reformers I know, myself included, agree 100% with this. It is in fact one of the reasons why many of us started charter schools; to create environments like this. It is the failure of public education to get to this that is the cause, IMO, of the current top down.
Tell me how we can get here without doing it in a charter school (seriously). The relationships between teachers and administrators, administrators and superintendents, superintendents and boards, the legislature, etc. all seem way too dysfunctional to make progress towards this goal.
Perhaps if this crowd would embrace like-minded people instead of labeling them privatizers, there might be some hope. When everyone starts arguing in support of institutions instead of the parents and educators and students, they lose me. The institution is pathetically dysfunctional, and arguing for its ideals instead of looking at the reality is why there is no discussion or debate.
This is why I think Deniers is the right title. On one hand, you can discuss what you think education can look like, but on the other hand, you brook no criticism of the existing system. Nobody from outside can make the same observations you make and ask for change. Nobody inside seems to have the mechanism to make it happen.
I’ll repeat, educators are reaping what they’ve sown. Deny that any change is needed and it will be forced on you, and it won’t look like what you want. You would think, as a profession, that educators would understand the value of self-reflection, humility about what they don’t know, and the need for continuous self-improvement. Maybe individuals do, but their elected representatives at the negotiating table sure don’t.
JPR, I assumed you were in the charter industry, and I guessed right. Those of us who are fighting privatization do not like the status quo. You and your supporters in Wall Street, ALEC, the Bush-Obama administrations, and the far-right created the status quo. Wake up and realize that you are destroying a basic democratic institution. Make it better, don’t monetize it. Learn what privatization has done to prisons, libraries, hospitals, and everything else it touches. Outsourcing, lower wages, cutting costs, sucking the institution dry, then closing it. This turmoil destroys communities and hurts children. It certainly does not produce better education. Welcome to the blog.
Not that I have to defend jpr, who’s perfectly capable, but this kind of one-size-fits-all response, Diane, is just as inappropriate in this forum as the one-size-fits-all approach of the CCSS is for public education.
I don’t know jpr’s charter, its mission, philosophy, and what prompted its founding. It’s clear that you don’t either. So lumping jpr’s charter in with the likes of Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy in Harlem is not only wrong but does, in fact, reinforce the notion that you and those who follow this blog welcome the us-vs-them mentality underpinning your response to him.
Several people in this thread, including myself, have acknowledged that there might be a role for charters within a viable framework for public education, if the underlying purpose of a charter is for experimentation intended to yield Best Practices intended to then be applied system-wide. There also are a number of well-intentioned and very effective charters that are neither funded by Banksters nor part of a large-scale conspiracy to bring down public education as we know it.
If the only voice the general public hears is from “the Resistance,” as this group has been characterized in your original blog post and reinforced through the majority of comments in response thereto in this thread, I hold no hope for saving public education. As I stated from my very first comment, we have to be about something, and not merely against something else. We need to acknowledge the failings of public education and be prepared to offer something more positive than the prevailing corporate takeover of public education and top-down standardization of teaching through the CCSS. While there has been considerable dialogue and debate on this thread about what that positive “something” should be, it certainly is not a cohesive message or effort and it is not widely or even marginally known to the MSM much less the general public.
I have never been accused of being a shrinking violet. I have, since a very young age, spoken my mind and suffered the consequences for it. Accordingly, and as a parting comment, I have to say that I find the tone of some of the comments in response to input from jpr, Peter Smyth, me, and others who are not quite in lockstep with the sentiment behind “the Resistance” to represent the antithesis of being an inclusive group seeking to build a consensus about how to improve public education, and the public’s confidence in it.
Anyone who argues that we need student learning to be more collaborative yet violates every axiom of collaboration in their rhetoric about improving student learning is a hypocrite. This group would do well, as an internal matter, to become much more self-reflective and much less reactive to messages that don’t square completely with their own.
I agree. I feel like this group is doubling down on every bad strategy that brought inappropriate evaluation systems, overly prescriptive laws and policies, and over-reliance on tests onto the public school system.
The message people hear is that it isn’t possible to change public education, so the choices are to accept it as is or destroy it. Lots of teachers and administrators have told me the same thing; they don’t like the way things are, but they see no way of changing them.
I guess Resistance is an apt title after all.
Thank you for so succinctly defining this entire group as reactionary obstructionists. There, how’s that for hyperbole?! You are right that we need to think about what makes for good education, but there is something to be said for being against something we know is wrong. The time will come, I hope, when the powers that be will truly be interested in what professionals have to say. It does not appear to be now since they effectively ignore even highly respected educators who they called on to further the CCSS agenda. It is only now when parents are beginning to see the effects on their children and react, that any attention has been paid to dissenting opinions. Up until now, I see no evidence that they have wanted anything but to dismantle the teaching profession and eliminate any voice teachers might have in the decision making.
Both psmirn and I, and others, question the use of “Resistance” in part because it gives reformers one more way to label us as “reactionary and obstructionist”. We know we’re not, but that’s irrelevant to them.
We’re making the argument first that here’s what we want for our kids, then why, say, testing co-opts that, and we should resist it by opting out.
I’m thinking about making arguments before a PTA or other parent groups.
Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates, all hose, can only talk policy. Our advantage is that we can talk about what really should happen in classrooms. We need to use that advantage. We can’t out-wonk them, even if our wonks are right.
We need to be able to step outside and see how we, the “anti-reformers”! Look and sound to all those in the middle.
I am thinking about the French Resistance. Whenever reactionaries occupy the seats of power, there is a resistance to them.
I’ve been thinking of the WWII French Resistance, too. They definitely had a well-defined mission, an enemy, and a clear vision of what they wanted.
But my fear is that “Resistance” can be relabeled”resistance”, and we don’t (yet) have the large majority of the population united in hatred of the Nazis. Or privatizers.
I realize, of course, things are never simple in France.
Diane,
I have no interest in privatization. I am as progressive as any person. The “democratic institution” that you say I’m destroying is destroying thousands of lives right now in my community.
You conflate many things to make your arguments. You imply that hedge fund managers are “investing” in schools, when in fact they are donating. You imply that charter schools are an industry, when most are individually run and even the “chains” as you refer to them are small.
Most charter schools are started by educators who are unhappy with the status quo. They are filled with students who want better than what they’ve gotten at neighborhood schools. They are chosen by parents who want the same.
You create straw men and then knock them down, and the crowd goes wild. Attacks based on false premises only get this reaction from the like-minded “oppressed”. Meanwhile, this adds nothing to the discussion of what can be done with public education.
The part of charter schools that you are attacking doesn’t exist at my school. We get no money from outside. We’re a 501c3 not-for-profit. We’re filled with dedicated educators and governed by volunteers that put in countless hours as well.
The way you lump all of them (children, parents, teachers, volunteers) into “privatizers” is demoralizing to them, as I expect you intend it to be. You apparently have no respect for them because they are “attacking” an institution. We used to call that civil disobedience. Institutions protect themselves from change. They deny there are issues. They personally attack critics. That’s most of what I see here.
Oh, and by “extrinsic challenges” (probably not the right words), I really mean externally motivated. Some people are driven in a very internal way and others require some external measurement to be their best.
I think most people respond to recognition, and I believe very strongly in career paths for teachers that want to stay teaching without going into administration. IMO, there is a definite need for instructional coaches and continuous professional development that seems to be largely not present in most schools I visit.
Read Daniel Pink “Drive” for the research on motivation. Financial is not high on the list.
Peter,
I have read Drive, and many other books like it. I wasn’t talking about financial motivation. Most people are motivated by the desire to make a difference and be valued. But, different personalities have different needs as far as external recognition (not monetary). For someone, it might be the desire to become a mentor teacher. Some others may have absolutely no desire for that.
I wouldn’t mind being a mentor teacher, but I wouldn’t be doing it so I could sport my mentor teacher button and I wouldn’t compete for the “honor.” I informally supported several fellow teachers as well as parapros over the years as did other teachers. We just didn’t call these relationships mentoring. No reward was required or expected although you might get a doughnut out of it. 🙂
Peter Smyth: pink’s “Drive” is excellent, as is Edward Deci “Why We Do What We Do,” and Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational.”
That’s not been my experience, jpr. I see a LOT of PD going on. Unfortunately, most of it takes the form of “trainings” in invariant lesson plan module formats and “unpacking” the amateurish new “standards.” I long for the day when English teachers attend PD that expands their content knowledge, their toolkits of pedagogical approaches, and their knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition. I’m seeing a lot of PD, but all related to putting kids through the standards-and-testing mill.
Bob,
We’re talking about the same thing. What I don’t see is continuous, useful, individualized, etc. What I do see is “trainings”; some useful, many not.
This is nothing new. We’ve had mentor teachers in my large school district since the 90s. I was a mentor teacher in the 2000s and those opportunities are still available to teachers here.
Don’t you just love it when know-it-alls, who think they’re a step ahead of genuine educators, are constantly telling us to do things we have already done for years? Just another example of how a “reformer” who claims to be current on matters is really way out of the loop.
exactly!!!! amazing how common that is!!!!
I had a mentor teacher in 1975-76. She was great. Retired now and I’m friends with her and her husband. She may live to be a 100 or more. Her mother and father both lived past 100.
Is she looking for a job?: 😉
LOL
No. She and her husband sacrificed and lived off one teacher paycheck for decades and invested the other paycheck, very wisely. They may both be retired teachers but the fortune they earned from those investments—literally millions—means they don’t have to rely on their CalSTRS teacher retirement as their only source of income.
In their 80s, they are living very well.
Right, Bob, and all of these dated and erroneous faux “reformer” claims fit precisely under your comment, “total hogwash”
Education officials in Finland do not throw around corp phrases or make claims that “teachers are drawn from the top college performers.”
Steve, teachers in Finland come from the top quintile of academic performance. It’s not a “phrase”, it’s a fact.
In the US, students who intend to study education in college scored lower on both verbal and math on the SAT than students in any other field (mean 479 math, 485 verbal).
Once in college, education majors were more likely to be in the bottom quartile and less likely to be in the top quartile than any other major.
Ignoring this, while cherry picking that Finland pays teachers more and has unions, is just another example of a profession that does not seem to want to improve.
As I read these posts, I’m thinking a better term is “deniers”. My nearby school with a zero % passing rate in 8th? Not a problem for the profession, because it’s the test’s fault, poverty, uninvolved parents, lack of money, etc. Tons of rationalizations, but no ownership. Hence, no credibility followed by legislative “solutions”.
ITA.
Nature abhors a vacuum. In the case of the #FauxEducationReform movement, that vacuum has been largely filled by charters, private ed for-profits, and international testing companies.
To the extent that vacuum was caused, in whole or in part, by the teaching profession and/or administrators and or unions and other advocates, then shame on the profession. Denying that there’s even a problem, and just crying “Resistance” is not a solution.
It’s not too late to heal any of these self-inflicted wounds. However, just as every 12-step program seems to start out, the first step is recognizing we have a problem.
Careful about agreeing with me too much. You might be accused of hanging out with the wrong crowd ;-). I got tired of waiting and started a charter school.
It is my particular “pleasure” to have my life’s volunteer efforts castigated here and lumped in with any other threat to the system.
Deep, rich content knowledge is not sufficient for good teaching, but it’s a necessity. Higher SATs or GPAs don’t guarantee that either. But they’re a pretty good overall starting point.
However, the conditions many teachers face, the status, and the pay, it’s sort of hard to attract the high flyers.
@jpr
BTW I lived and taught at a music academy in Turku, Finland for 5 years so I’d like you to provide some empirical backup on your educational claims regarding that country. Thanks.
I’ve read a few books on the subject, but “Finnish Lessons” was the most interesting. Diane cites this book. From that…
There are 8 Finnish Universities that offer teacher education programs. They accept about 1 in every 10 candidates,
Also, “Finland is perhaps the only nation that is able to select its primary school teacher-students form the top quintile of all high school graduates year after year.”
People don’t enter teaching because it’s too “non-competitive” and teachers need “more extrinsic challenges”? We can readily guess what kind of discipline approach is implemented at this guy’s charter school. Ignore him and his ongoing reformy campaigns here, folks.
CaresAboutKidsTeachers,
My point wasn’t that those things are true about many teachers. My point was that there are probably types of people who prefer those things in a work environment that currently may have less interest in teaching because they are not present.
My guess is those people who are looking for a competitive work environment are not cut out to be K-12 teachers. I have no idea what extrinsic challenges even means.
2old2teach,
I’m not talking about competitive like teacher against teacher. I’m talking about people who are very goal driven and have a great desire to be the best they can be; to hone their pedagogical skills. There are certainly many teachers like that now, but I think there are also people who might be like that who are no attracted to the inability for differentiation between teachers, etc.
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the mindset that says that all teachers for all subjects should receive equal pay, etc.; just pointing out that not all people think that way and that the field may be losing out on valuable people for that reason.
I don’t see lots of “type A” people becoming elementary school teachers, but I’ve seen some very driven people be extremely effective middle and high school teachers, but then get burnt out by the homogeneity of the environment. I don’t expect many readers here to agree with this sentiment, but that’s part of the point.
“I’ve seen some very driven people be extremely effective middle and high school teachers, but then get burnt out by the homogeneity of the environment.”
Funny. I have seen the opposite phenomena although it depends on what they are driven by. People who have spent their lives in careers, typically considered to be the realm of the type A personality, who retire and become teachers. They have had enough of pursuing a competitive advantage and chasing extrinsic rewards. Instead, they get to use their skills to focus on the growth of the next generation. We do not need schools of people jockeying for position. Competitions around department chairmanship can get very political and ugly and certainly do nothing to aid the smooth administration of a department. Yes, people enjoy recognition for their work, but that is typically not a driving force in becoming a teacher. In fact it can detract from their focus on the students. Typically, those people are in danger of becoming considered prima-donnas. Their satisfaction comes more from their own pursuit of externally recognized success rather than the success of their students. I ran into a few of those types in my highly competitive high school. Some of them were good teachers but they were frequently considered to be a-h***s. They tended to be quite dictatorial, students were “performing” to show off the teacher’s excellence. Kind of gets in the way of trying to instill an intrinsic love of learning In your students. Burnt out because they were bored?! Give me a break! That person is not a teacher.
I guess you have missed the studies on merit pay with teachers.
“…teachers are drawn from the top college performers….”
None of you elitists has ever demonstrated that “top college performers” make the best teachers. Can you support that?
Note also that the supposed low performers are in a select cohort of teachers — those who chose to major in Education. Many, many teachers throughout the USA did NOT major in Education, they chose to major in their fields of expertise. For example, I teach English (and ESL), and I was an English major — not an education major.
It seems to me that people who actually major in Education are more likely to move on from the classroom to become administrators. Make of that what you will in the context of Education majors having low SAT scores.
That reminds me of my favorite lawyer joke:
What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of her class in medical school?
Doctor.
What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of his class in law school?
Your Honor.
With apologies to any lawyers are judges here who might be offended, but it seemed a fitting response.
Really good point. I didn’t major in education either. H-m-m-m.
People here are falling into the elitist trap, because they don’t want to be labeled as coming from the “bottom of the barrel”. I can relate to that, because I don’t like that label either, since I graduated from high school with straight As, had high ACTs, have a high IQ, am creative and I consider myself to be an intellectual, due to my ongoing personal commitment to life-long learning.
However, in my state, as in many other states, P-8 teachers could not major in a single content area, because we needed to be prepared to teach all content areas to young children, for whom departmental is not developmentally appropriate (except for specials -though I taught all of those as well). Thus, in addition to my degree in Liberal Arts, I earned degrees in education, since that was the only way that I could study to teach young children in Early Childhood general education and Special Education. I value my training in education and do not regret it for one minute.
Elitism is a divide and conquer strategy, so if you fall for it, you run the risk of teachers turning against each other, each group blaming the other for low test scores and high dropout rates. We don’t hear complaints about “bottom of the barrel” teachers in high income areas, because teacher quality is not really the issue.
Never lose sight of the fact that it’s the “reformers” who have targeted teachers, because they want to replace veteran, high salaried union teachers with novice, low-salaried non-union temps. Politicians who continue to avoid addressing poverty are the ones who are truly culpable, not teachers.
Teacher Ed,
My concern is that one can’t raise an issue regarding, for example, schools of education, without being accused of teacher bashing. Would I be “doctor bashing” if I said something about medical entrance exams being to easy?
The fact is that some very reputable studies show that our teacher preparation programs are nowhere near what they should be. They are considered “cash cows” by universities, and even most teachers that I know consider them very poor preparation.
We have a system that requires them in most states. My school had to lose two provisionally certified teachers (with BA degrees) because they didn’t get their master’s degrees in time. One left for Harvard and one for Columbia. Both left the classrooms where they had been our top two teachers on many measures.
The profession needs to be able to look at itself with some self-reflection. I’m not accusing any teacher of being “bottom of the barrel”, nor do I like the term. I’m just pointing out that the bar to enter the teaching profession is not high, and that I think part of “professionalizing” teaching is working to raise that bar.
As for the contention that nobody has “proven” that teachers from the highest quintile are better than teachers from the lowest, that may be true, though I think Finland makes a good case for it, and personally, I think the relative success of TFA teachers with very little training also helps make the case. That is an extremely competitive program that draws from the top of the class at many top colleges in the country. It’s certainly not without its flaws, but I do think it helps make the case.
I wish it were possible to focus on the goal of making the programs more competitive, which I know many other bloggers here agree is a good idea. I think many potentially great teachers don’t enter the field because it is seen as a non-competitive field from entry through retirement, and some types of people thrive in and require that environment.
Teaching is certainly very challenging, and for teachers motivated to do their personal best, it can be extremely so. But, lots of people do better with extrinsic challenges and a more defined track to follow to excellence (perhaps National Board Certification is part of the solution).
I was addressing genuine teachers, not someone who promotes TFA, charters and all the “reform” garbage about which you keep ranting that I’m not going to waste my time on here.
Magic bullet TFAers and charters to save the poor, more competition and extrinsic rewards for higher quality teachers, etc. are all the same talking points that we’ve seen over and over again in the billionaire owned mainstream media. People need to stop wasting their time on this long-winded peddler of faux “reform.”
For those who push extrinsic (monetary) rewards, we need to ask “how much do you think it would take to really motivate?” Think Wall Street, athletes, big college coaches.
I’m not pulling out the really excellent, hidden lesson plans for any salary under $1M, because I’m in this field for the money and greed is good. Just don’t expect me to save any kids from school shootings or stabbings because that will cost more, but I’m worth it, since I’m private school / Ivy League material –even though I know nothing about child and adolescent development or non-cognitive and cognitive skills. (I’m holding out for a big stipend for lunchroom duties, too, since I’m also a Top Chef because I ate at my mom’s kitchen table all my life.)
I really enjoyed reading this post by jpr. I have been reading this blog daily for over a year and this is the first time I have replied. I have always felt that a part of this deform movement is brought on by ourselves and our inability to hold ourselves as teachers accountable. I work with a few good teachers who are driven and care about their work and their students, but I work with many more who are mediocre at best and in many cases just terrible. And they go on year after year being terrible and nothing is done eventhough we have had a teacher evaluation process in place for decades. No, I don’t believe even the best teachers can overcome some of the hardships our students face, but I see a lot of students in the middle, with potential, who could have endless opportunities if taught by good teachers.
Dave4, why does your principal allow bad teachers to remain? Why aren’t they fired?
What is it about the teachers that render them mediocre and/or terrible? What are the good teachers doing that these bad teachers are not? I guess what I am asking for is some inclusion criteria in what makes a teacher bad vs. good.
We confuse good teaching with good teachers. Most good teaching is a result of circumstances – support, schools culture, resources, colleagues, all those things.
Unless we get those things right, we have no idea whether a teacher is good or bad.
So there’s no actual criteria for what makes a teacher good or bad?
The principals I have had are either unaware of what is going on in the classrooms, or are afraid of confrontation, or are more concerned about being liked by the staff to do anything about bad teaching. I don’t think the principals in my district are held accountable for much either, so why should they hold teacher accountable. At my grade level in Ohio we have been a testing grade for over 15 years and that does put some pressure on teachers to not necessarily do better, but to get better scores. So I have a teacher next to me who starts doing testing packets as soon as winter break is over. This teacher has other ways of getting passing scores too, which I won’t get into. And this teacher is probably one of the poorer teachers around. But the teacher gets enough passing scores, so I guess the principal would not have reason to question this teacher’s teaching. But if the principal would check in a couple times a week, he would see this teacher grading papers while the students watch a tv show, among other not-so-best practices.
I guess my point above was just to acknowledge that we do have some problems in public education. And a big one is teacher quality. I think an administrator’s ability to enforce high quality teaching is very limited. And there really doesn’t seem to be enough truly dedicated, intelligent, hardworking people going into teaching. That’s just from what I have seen in my experiences as a teacher.
But the silver tongued spokespeople for the corporate reformers will look incredulously at this and protest, “But we’re NOT on opposite sides! We’re ALL in this together — fighting for what’s best for the kids! They’re the ones who REALLY matter, not petty factions of adults with minor philosophical differences! Wouldn’t you agree?”
They will then insinuate that anyone who doesn’t agree must not really care about the kids, after all.
Superb. That’s exactly what it needs to be called. The term recalls many historical examples of resistance to foreign occupation and to imposition of outside authority intent upon curtailing freedom of thought and action.
Ed deform has created in our schools precisely the sort of climate of fear that existed in Vichy France, for example, where ordinary citizens dared not speak against the policies of the occupation or against collaboration with the occupiers for fear of losing their jobs (or worse).
It is important to choose language that conveys, via forceful connotation, the climate of fear that Ed Deform creates and the determination of those who have dedicated themselves to restoring autonomy to teachers and schools and to preserving the greatest institution for the advancement of the human condition that the world has ever seen, the free U.S. public education system.
Plutôt mourir debout que vivre à genoux
Rather die standing than live on your knees
We are an Allied Alliance who formed in order to resist the Common Core. As a follow-up to our unity, we should write and agree-to a type of Atlantic Charter that spells-out our shared goals for a post-Common Core school environment.
I’m using the term Common Core to represent the myriad terrible reformist ideologies at work.
You mean something beyond realists?
Beautifully said, Diane!
Yes! And the kids understand that. Everything from Tom Angleberger’s Origami series to the Hunger Games and Divergent is giving kids that mindset.
Confused. What mindset?
“Resistance” is not a good label; that’s just what the reformers are painting us as.
In fact, one of our greatest soft points. Is that we have not really articulated a vision for where education should go, what should be happening in classrooms.
If not testing, what? If not Common Core, what?
Most of of probably have a solid view of teaching and learning, but we’re not getting the message out, or at best in bits and pieces.
I’m not into this just to resist high stakes testing or CCSS;I want to move beyond them.
Lets not forget that certain “resisters” of the Common Core would take us back to 1950.
I respectfully disagree, Peter. Historically, many a successful movement has made its greatest headway when it EMBRACED the charges from the other side. “Puritan” was a derogatory label. But it resonated.
Yes, Arne, Bill, Jeb, Michelle, we Resist your reforms. For they are not reforms. And we shall no longer allow you, the deformers, to control the language of this debate.
And I concur with Peter and disagree with this comment, Bob.
We’re in a political climate where merely resisting something without offering a positive and coherent message of what we’re for is a losing proposition. Look at the GOP and its opposition to the Affordable Care Act. That’s what labeling our efforts as “the Resistance” will become. An opportunity for the MSM’s scorn. That’s not going to earn us any converts.
That’s not to say we should not resist changes to the public education system we believe are actually harmful. But we much represent more than just fighting change.
I sincerely apologize for my tone. I’m tired, having worked all evening at my writing. You are absolutely right that I should not be dismissive, and I did very much enjoy the one article that I read by you, and I very much welcome you to this discussion. But it is precisely my point that there should be no deference to any single authority, and certainly not to amateurs like David Coleman. The last thing we need is mandates from top-down reformers, one ring to rule them all. Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
Although I’m not certain about the law, most professions, medicine, architecture, engineering, etc., have agreed on standards (different use of the word), practices, protocols, training. The source is,of course, the professionals themselves.
Is it possible for that to happen for teaching (note I say teaching, not teachers)? If so, how do we get here?
Do you suppose they have to write what standards they are using on their briefs or on their surgical notes? You would think that before CCSS we all wandered around doing our own thing without any consideration for what we taught, how we taught it, and why we taught it. We didn’t.
“Do you suppose they have to write what standards they are using on their briefs or on their surgical notes?”
No but (1) they can’t gain access to the profession without meeting the requirements set forth by that profession and (2) if they violate any of their profession’s tenants they may be subject to disciplinary proceedings that may include no longer being able to continue practicing that profession.
I think Peter’s suggestion is certainly worthy of consideration and should not be quite so easily dismissed. And, quite frankly, anyone who wants to see the teachers better compensated–and I count myself among them–should think seriously about the benefits of developing and adopting a set of standards.
The ABA, AMA, AIA, AICPA, NAR are all examples of governing organizations that exist to assure their members adhere to a code of professional standards.
Teaching is basically framed as a public service profession. Unless a teacher tutors they do not have a private practice model that is standard among all the professions you mentioned. There is not a professional teacher’s organization that sets standards and has the power over a teacher’s career. In some ways, I would argue that incompetent members of private practice professions are more protected by their professional organizations than most teachers. They are judged by their own members. Unions offer some protection but unlike private practice professions have no judicial authority.
cx: ecologies
Peter Smythe:
That’s a very, very good question. That’s why I champion the open-source wiki alternative to the Common Core. A repository of practices.
To me, the Common Core in ELA reads like what one would have gotten by handing David Coleman a copy of the 1858 Gray’s Anatomy and sending him to the woods to write standards for the practice of medicine based on that.
We need to show the world a real alternative, and I am thinking, hard, about what the structure for a portal for that purpose might look like, and I encourage others to do so as well.
a repository of voluntary, competing, alternative practices: frameworks, curriculum maps/learning progressions, certification guidelines, lesson templates, assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performative), standards, pedagogical techniques, models, materials, texts. Open sourced and as varied as are the scholars, researchers and teachers in this great ecological system that is education in our country. A dramatically varied and rich collection of alternatives to the Powerpoint bullet list from Gates, Coleman, & Co.
This is a wonderful challenge, Bob. And in my view, a completely correct one. How might I contribute, I wonder?
Are we living on the same planet? Standards for teaching and learning were established by professional organizations in education, such as NCTE, NCTM, NAEYC, CEC, etc. Politicians do not permit educators to self-regulate though, as they do attorneys, physicians, etc., because most educators are not in business for themselves. So, while professional peers have recommended gate keeping in education, they have no teeth because state governments usurped that power in public education.
There are different rules for private enterprises though, so this means in private K-12 schools and privately managed charters, virtually anyone can call themselves an educator. They don’t have to meet standards established by professional organizations in education at all and very few standards established by government apply to them. I’ve worked at enough sub-par private schools with faux educators to be all in for self-regulation of the field, regardless of place of employment. Of course, that would mean celebrity entertainers and politicians would have to actually study human development, learning, teaching, content, etc. before they could hang a shingle. They’re the ones with money and power though, so that’s never going to happen.
Teachers are represented by unions in most places, and I haven’t seen NCTE, NCTM, NAEYC, or CEC mentioned in any collective bargaining agreement. There has not been any “real” effort to bring these standards into the workplace.
When states and districts had their own coordinated standards, the standards of all of those professional associations were integrated into my state and district standards for learning, teaching and teacher education. I have never belonged to a union, so I have no idea why anyone would think that labor unions that represent a diverse field with many specialties should have anything to do with adopting the standards of professional organizations representing those specialties. Direct professional participation was what was needed for those standards to be adopted, not unions.
Well said.
ITA, Peter. Please refer to my other comments, above. We can’t simply be against something; we need to articulate a positive, unified vision and then provide specifics for its implementation. This is what I’ve been trying to do through my HuffPost Education articles.
Thanks, psmirn. Without a positive position, it sounds like we’re playing gotcha.
I happen to think we should be selling, and we actually have a far superior. product.
But you wouldn’t guess that with a constant stream of naysaying.
Something like this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-smirniotopoulos/post_3156_b_1375546.html
…and even this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-smirniotopoulos/public-education-and-job-_2_b_4978571.html
For two years now, we have been articulating, right here, on this blog, a positive alternative to Education Deform. I have written hundreds of posts, here, about returning autonomy to schools and making use of Japanese style Lesson Study to create teacher-led continuous, bottom-up improvement.
Our schools are not failing. If you correct for SES, our students lead the world on the very international tests that are the preferred Ed Deformer measures of success. Before you make these comments about the people here being simply AGAINST things, please educate yourself. This has been a site for continual discussion among hundreds of highly experienced educators of positive alternatives, for two years now.
But, Bob, this blog, as valuable as it may be, is preaching to the converted. Please show me how that unified message is being disseminated to the MSM and the general public. We’re losing this battle in the court of public opinion, what’s transpired on this blog notwithstanding.
Also, challenging the numerous assessments that demonstrate the U.S. continues to fall behind other developed countries in public education is a losing proposition. That sounds like the education equivalent of climate science denial.
I’ve documented in my recent articles the findings from global skills tests, which are echoed by U.S. employers who lament the lack of basic skills even among college grads. As a grad school professor, I’ve witnessed first-hand students’ lack of critical thinking, writing, and basic thought-organization skills.
What more proof does one need to accept that our public education system needs a paradigm shift? Arguing “everything’s fine/ nothing to see here” will merely reinforce the #FauxEducationReform movement’s winning narrative that teachers are out of touch and more interested in their own tenure than improving the education system.
I have, for example, posted this, in much the same words, to this blog, about thirty times in the last year, each time to considerable discussion:
So, what’s the alternative? (Ed Deformers always ask this, expecting stunned silence in reply. Well, here’s the alternative.)
An open-source wiki to which are published, for every domain, in every subject, for varied learners, at every grade level, VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, ALTERNATIVE
standards
frameworks
sample lesson plans
model curricula
learning progressions (aka curriculum maps)
pedagogical techniques, strategies, and rationales
model assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performance)
texts
in a variety of formats (including video)
prepared by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, practitioners (teachers, curriculum coordinators, other administrators), and professionals in various fields
That’s how you get innovation.
You don’t get it via regimentation, standardization, and top-down mandates from a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, from a national curriculum and pedagogy Thought Police.
Very well said, Bob.
Beautiful, Bob.
psmirn
In his book The Educated Imagination, critic Northrup Frye writes about one of the earliest surviving texts that is not simply a record of the amount of grain in some granary. It’s a Sumerian text that reads, “Children no longer obey their parents nor honor the gods.” That line about how our kids are failing is the oldest cliche of them all! No, we are not, as Frost pointed out in his “Letter to the Amherst Student” going down under the most powerful forces ever marshaled by god. Read Richard Rothstein before you go passing along the Rheeformish myth about how our kids are failing. He’s crunched the numbers. Total balderdash.
Do you know about the Flynn Effect? IQ tests have to be renormed each decade because of the steady increases in our average IQ scores. An average score on the Weschler today would be genius level in 1930, given all that renorming. And the fact is, again, if you correct for SES, our students, in every area, lead or are very near the top on the international exams. Diane has posted Rothstein’s work here. Go read it. It will disabuse you of that particualar Rheeformish myth.
Bob, I have to say the increasingly condescending tone of almost every one of your responses to me makes it almost impossible to have a discussion on this thread. In that regard, you are serving only the interests of the #FauxEducationReformers by dividing what should otherwise be a unified front against them.
If you’re clearly the most-informed and enlightened person in this discussion, as you seem to believe yourself to be, then perhaps we should all just defer to you and let you fix everything.
cx: Wechsler, of course
There you go again, Peter, as RR used to say:
“That sounds like the education equivalent of climate science denial.”
Climate science denial is a totally false category. Global warming is a politically motivated hoax. You know this.
Or have I misunderstood your metaphor?
Peter, says:
Deep, rich content knowledge is not sufficient for good teaching, but it’s a necessity.
That could well go over the entrance to every teachers’ college. Much, much wisdom there, and it’s beautifully, simply said.
Resistance is the only word to use at this point in the war on public education and our democracy. We cannot mince words any longer in calling out these rich, powerful and greedy people who want to destroy our profession and our schools. ^0^
Why not call ourselves The Educators. That is who we are.
Definitely an improvement in my eyes.
That’s certainly how I refer to myself but it is perhaps too generic and doesn’t acknowledge the need for and intention to reform public education.
I think focusing on #studentlearning gets across a fundamental difference between genuine education reform and the #FauxEducationReform against which Diane and many others are fighting. It focuses on the goal rather than the structural process by which it may be achieved.
Very much agree with all of your points, psmirn, and very much appreciate your articles.
Peter, I just read one of your pieces. Good to have you here. Great that you are championing divergent thinking.
But please be aware that many hundreds of educators have been discussing positive alternatives to deform on this blog for two years no. It’s insulting for you to suggest otherwise.
Resistance is called for. Read the posts on TestingTalk.org.
What is happening across the country right now in the name of “reform” is child abuse.
And it must be resisted.
Bob, I’m glad you’re welcoming me to the conversation and I don’t mean to insult anybody by my coming, apparently, late to the party.
But from my POV, which has much more of a national and political focus, I’m not seeing anyone, other than perhaps Diane, championing the cause for which I believe we’re all signed up.
As perhaps the only or most-visible voice for real education reform in the U.S., I have a concern that Diane’s voice will be marginalized if it becomes only of “the Resistance.” We have so much more to offer.
Yes, CCSS needs to be opposed. Yes both the #standardizationmovement and the proliferation of charters both need to be resisted. But, we have to have a positive message for #accountability going forward and we must effectively articulate a counter-narrative for what I continue to believe should be a true paradigm shift in how students learned and how that learning is assessed.
Peter, you keep saying that. And I keep telling you, read widely in this blog. Read Diane’s books. It is extraordinarily insulting for you to pop onto this blog and assume that we do not have a positive message and haven’t been articulating that nationally. Breathtakingly insulting.
That Peter is a newcomer is irrelevant.,I’ve been here for the duration. There have been some positive things,,but I’ve observed in the last few months, the blog, with a few exceptions, has devolved, sometimes as bad as some of the early BATS discussions, where people banned for crossing lines.
If this is a battle between us and them, the “deformers”, we lose. We can only win by winning the general public, the uncommitted. What’s happening now, is that the public has become like the fans at a tennis match, watching the volleys. We have to be able to look at things as the uncommitted and uninformed, and make our vision what they want for their own child. And as soon as we stoop to name-calling, we lose their attention.
To an outsider it looks as if neither side has any clothes.
I see your point, Peter. I do. But I also hear the suffering of millions of kids taking these abusive new tests. Spec ed kids. ELLs. Kids who are just plain unique. And derision is a powerful force. A lot of social psychology is about social sanction, positive and negative. The people who created the amateurish CC$$ in ELA should have long ago been laughed off the national stage by educators who actually knew something about teaching writing, reading, literature, grammar, research skills, vocabulary, etc.
Peter Smyth, no one has been banned from this blog for crossing lines. Truth and accuracy matter.
Corporate School reform is nothing but kickbacks and old school corruption. It is a criminal justice problem more than an educational problem. Now it’s also a problem of National Security!
It is. It’s time to stop making nice nice with the people spouting this “reform” trash.
I’m 100% with you Bob.
Bob, you took the words right out of my mouth! This war is not about improving education! It is about the take over of public education for monetary gain. That is what we must resist and make public!
What we have most to fear is fear itself. Ed Deform creates a climate of fear. It makes people afraid to speak up, to be clear about their resistance to the deforms.
We need to be very, very clear about that resistance.
We need to stop allowing the Education Deformers to frame the debate. We need to stop speaking in the Rheeformish tongue.
What the Deformers do not recognize is that teachers are overwhelmingly on our side. They hate the tests. They hate VAM. They hate their “trainings” on the “Core.” Read what teachers are saying on TestingTalk.org.
We need to take the gloves off.
Bob Shepherd: IMHO, I think this comment of yours is the most important of this thread.
But before I go on, I want to say that whether I agree in part or whole with anyone else on this thread, that I welcome all of you to this discussion and I value your opinions. And by value, I am not qualifying that under my breath to mean “just this person’s but not that person’s.” Dismissive contempt is the hallmark of the self-styled “education reformers.” They’re good at modeling it—
And as Harlan Underhill might say, we don’t need to make them our mentors.
😉
Several points.
First, I have been on this blog since day one. I must humbly say that I do not think this blog has a “choir” so much as a regular viewership that keeps changing and expanding. Yes, there is a very very small self-selected part of that viewership that posts comments. Yet how many times over the last almost two years does someone write “I have been following this blog for x number of weeks/months and this is the first time I am commenting”? This blog is just like being in a classroom year after year: the learning and teaching go on and on, and over time the composition of those in the classroom changes, but it never has a definite ending and what is taught and how never stays the same. The aforesaid may be unacceptable to some, but that is how I see this blog. If the charterite/privatization movement were stopped in its tracks today and the real issues in public education became front and center, this blog would still go up tomorrow pushing and arguing for a “better education for all.” No exceptions, nowhere, no how.
Second, you cannot convince people of what you never argue for. In other words, you have to literally, actually, explicitly say what you are for and what you are against. IMHO, it’s like arguing for all the [literally unproven] benefits of Commoners Core while decrying its associated high-stakes standardized testing with its [few] rewards and [many] punishments for students, teachers and parents. Or like arguing for “choice not voice” by giving charters every advantage in their ‘competition’ with public schools while starving and strangling the latter. Say what you mean, mean what you say. Otherwise you will not only be misunderstood, you won’t even be understood to begin with.
Third, you cannot expect those leading the charterite/privatization movement to engage in anything more than product placement, controlled public exercises in product launches, and the occasional attempt at the rebranding of eduproducts like Commoners Core that have encountered ‘consumer resistance.’ The recent public statements of Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan are proof [if any was needed] that trying to engage the heads of the “new civil rights movement of our time” is a futile exercise—otherwise Michelle Rhee and David Coleman and others would have met with Diane Ravitch on the field of battle called public debate and discussion and proved the power of their ideas.
Fourth and last, there has never been a movement for genuine beneficial social change that had smooth sledding. Since the fiftieth anniversary is coming up soon, I remind everyone that on June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered during Mississippi Freedom Summer. Their ultimate sacrificed was validated by those who, even while fearful of losing their own lives, refused to back down and moderate their demands for full equality for all Americans.
Are we being too “strident” and “shrill”? I think not. “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” [Harriet Tubman]
Please excuse this overly long comment.
And again, thanks to ALL of you for participating.
😎
I appreciate all of your input, above, especially the parts where all voices are welcome. I have been very good about using social media to disseminate a number of Diane’s blog entries but this is certainly my first entry into engaging in any kind of ongoing discussion. I try not to take personally comments that imply that by not having been an active participant all along my point of view is not worthy. In fact, I would argue the opposite: That coming to this discussion with somewhat of an outsider’s perspective I offer, perhaps, some unique observations. Anyone who has read my writings and social media contributions to the discussion about “education reform” will know that my commitment is beyond peradventure.
One of your comments is particularly worthy of further discussion:
“Are we being too “strident” and “shrill”? I think not.”
Allow me to suggest that those may be the wrong questions. Are we being effective? That’s the more-important question IMO.
Bob makes a number of valid points and suggestions. The problem I have is not with the substance but with the fact messages like his about what would be a much more effective system of public education is not getting to the public. And my concern is not that the public isn’t listening but that we’re not conveying the message in a consistent and comprehensive fashion.
We need to think about this like a political campaign, for which there are a number of existing and emerging parallels. In many respects, what’s going on in the #FauxEducationReform movement parallels the plight of the 1% against the 99%. There’s a very effective, populist message that can be crafted; we just need to find some mechanism for getting consensus on what that is.
Again using the analogy of a political campaign, “the Resistance” has something the #PublicSchoolProfiteers lack: A grassroots organization in every state. Teachers are our greatest strength. They are parents’ and students’ first and last point-of-contact on all things education. And teachers committed to being effective educators are all about posing questions to their students and guiding an informative debate.
So, to summarize a long response to a long comment, we need a coordinated message everyone can get behind and it can’t be simply “what’s going on is wrong.” It has to be “What’s going on is wrong, and here’s why it’s wrong, and here’s what we should be doing in our schools.”
Personally, I would prefer to call this movement “Better Education for All” because that hits a number of themes. But perhaps Diane’s idea of branding our efforts isn’t the worst place to start to pull together the resistance and the reformation.
So, to summarize a long response to a long comment, we need a coordinated message everyone can get behind and it can’t be simply “what’s going on is wrong.” It has to be “What’s going on is wrong, and here’s why it’s wrong, and here’s what we should be doing in our schools.”
Diane spends several chapters addressing this in “Reign of Error”. Summarize her ideas and you have your simple message of what to do right.
I think we should borrow the phrase “No means no” and back it up with absolute action.
“Enough is enough” works too.
Mm. To me, EnoughIsEnough implies that a little bit is OK. It goes hand in hand with the phrase “just say when.”
I feel very strongly that the reform movement in question is 100% morally reprehensible – always, all the time and no matter what. That’s the level of outrage that needs communicating.
How about “Not With My Child.”
OK sure not my child. But if not my child, then whose? I’ll tell you – the children of absent or negligent parents of course. The more we focus sloganizing on the “my child” approach, the more we unintentionally expose unadvocated children to the reform vultures.
Just my humble opinion.
School House? OUR House!
Whose Child? My Child!
Ooh that’s good!!
What the deformers do not recognize is that people already way, way ahead of them. They have already rejected the numerology on which deform is based. They have already rejected the backward extrinsic punishment and reward model of education that they are pushing.
But people are afraid. They are afraid to speak up. They are told in their “trainings” that they have to be “positive.”
Abuse this child and be positive about it.
No. No more.
Sorry about the typos. My computer is balky this morning.
cx:
What the deformers do not recognize is that people are already way, way ahead of them. They have already rejected the numerology on which deform is based. They have already rejected the backward, demotivating extrinsic-punishment-and-reward model of education that the deformers are pushing.
But people are afraid. They are afraid to speak up. They are told in their “trainings” that they have to be “positive.” They are being told that they will lose their jobs unless they collaborate with smiles on their faces.
Abuse this child and be positive about it.
No. No more.
I would say we are the Defiant. Standing up for what we know to be right. We accept change but not blindly as the Reformers expected us to do. I think that has been the biggest surprise for them, they just thought we’d all think this was great and go along. Especially since they had spent so much time, in the press, bad mouthing the current educational programs (mind you NCLB was really also their idea). Maybe we’re not all the Defiant but I definitely AM.
“For example, we could tell every member of the movement to put a bumper sticker on his car that says, ‘Public Education is rotten; Home school your kids’ “. That is a reported quote from the 2000, repackaging of the ideas of ALEC co-founder, Paul Weyrich, as reported by Bob Sloan, Oct. 1, 2011, in an article at Daily Kos. Further quoting, “We will take every opportunity to spread the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the existing state of affairs…Our movement will be entirely destructive…We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We intend to weaken them and eventually destroy them….We will remain a constant barrage of criticism…We need to create a dissatisfaction with society to start picking people off and bringing them over to our side…
We will create our own institutions.”
Relative to the concert of Koch and Gates goals, read Daily Kos, on June 13, 2012,
“ALEC In Battle Over Public and Private Education”, by Bob Sloan.
If the AFT hasn’t hired a professional crisis management firm that has access to powerful influencers, it’s long time past the time to do so. And, they need to find leaders like Diane, who will work for the American democracy.
I agree that the deformers are way, way ahead on message. Their most effective messages are: “schools are failing,” “children can’t wait,” and “parents deserve choice.” In almost every case, those of us on the opposite side are in the weaker position of responding, i.e. (in order) “most schools aren’t failing, and the exceptions are due to poverty,” “children certainly can wait if the alternative is to subject them to poorly written curricula and brutal, abusive tests,” and “parents deserve choice but not at the expense of local public schools, not to mention all attempts to retain diversity and educate special needs and english language learners in the same classrooms as other children.”
The Tea Party has rather brilliantly co-opted a piece of American history and reframed it to suit their (warped) needs, with a message that is simple and intuitive. I think what Diane is suggesting is something similar that harkens back to, say, the French resistance in World War 2. My question is, though, whether the Resistance resonates with the American public in the same way that the Tea Party does.
What is our message? Our schools aren’t failing, and they’re preparing most children quite well. We are not change-averse, just averse to poorly thought out change that doesn’t do anything but funnel taxpayer money into corporate pockets. The big one: Poverty is the problem with failing schools. And the complicated one, to parents: There has always been choice. Choose differently if you must, but by choosing your local school, you are building community and making your own patch of the world a better place.
I guess my big question is: how do you get across, with simple words, something that is nuanced?
This is what the speakers of the Rheeformish tongue have mastered: the non-nuanced, clobber-them-over-the-head-with-it message. Achieve ran as its headline on its Home page for a solid year the message “Our schools are failing.” Not, our schools that serve very impoverished children are in trouble. Not, if you correct for socioeconomic level, our schools are the best in the world.
Theirs are “simple” (and simple-minded) messages.
Schools are failing
We’re falling behind.
Accountability
Fewer, “higher” standards (LOL)
Class size doesn’t matter
Data-based decision making
Rigor
blah blah blah
They are masters of the distorted but unequivocal message. And the press likes it that way. Simple. Simple-minded. Read my lips easy.
When I hear parents go on about school choice and how that choice is necessary for their children to “get ahead,” my standard reply is “Ahead of what? This is America. Last time I checked, this is still the country where a publicly educated kid from Wapakoneta, Ohio became the 1st human on the moon and where a penniless refugee teenager from war-torn Europe enrolled in the City College of New York and went on to invent the Intel Chip. In these two examples (two out of literally a thousand), what did Neil Armstrong and Andy Grove “get ahead of” in order to achieve these things? Can you identify it? If you can, is it the same thing your children need to get ahead of via school choice, charters etc.?
This usually renders people speechless. The cannot name it, because it has no name. It is simply fear.
🙂
the Word “Choice” is the “Zeig Heil” of the fake reform movement. I wonder when the fake reformers will start issuing arm bands or bracelets with this slogan on them.
By the way, Zieg Heil in German means “we will win” and it was used by Nazis as an alternative to “Heil Hitler”.
Sadly, it is level of conviction behind the choice zeig heilers that’s notable.
This is what our movement lacks – conviction, verve, assuredness, confidence of authority – whatever you want to call it. We need to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. The only word they need to hear is “No.”
Precisely: “We need to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people.”
It is a waste of time to reason with the fake reformers or even complain about them and what they are doing. Instead, we should focus on an all out assault on their credibility and the credibility of their message by doing all we can to educate the wider public.
Before we can hear most of America shout “NO”, Americans must know what they are shouting about. I saw a relatively recent Gallup Poll that reported 60% of Americans haven’t heard of Common Core and even more don’t know what it is or what it’s doing.
And we can be sure the fake reformers aren’t going to tell them, because they know it will be widely unpopular.
Yup. We need to tap into the Harry S. Truman energy behind, “They are wrong and we are right and I’m going to prove it to you!”
Because you know what? They ARE wrong. And not just a little wrong or somewhat misguided with good intentions. No. They are wrong WRONG! Say it. Mean it. Don’t back down.
The main problem I have with this approach is that the people who matter most in the debate, the parents of the students who are being and will continue to be adversely affected are, in fact, reasonable people. Coming across as rabidly committed to opposition, in and of itself, may not win over many converts. Talking about fascism and the Nazi regime is fine for an internal discussion but is a losing proposition in a public forum IMO.
I have a similar problem with Lloyd’s recommendation that I read Diane’s “Reign of Error,” assuming that I have not already. I’m not the person who needs to be directed to read Diane’s book or this blog. I’m already on the right side of this issue and I have written and will continue to write about it.
The only or at least fundamental question is how do we engage the parents and voters (many are one-in-the-same) to change their thinking about what’s the best education for their children and the students in their school districts when the #FauxEducationReform movement already has a toe-hold in the debate. They’re not only well ahead of the game they’re using very sophisticated tactics to gain traction.
Finally, and I may actually shut up after this, regarding my “discussion” with Bob about whether or not the measurements of the U.S. losing ground in education against other developed nations is that even if Bob is absolutely right statistically, the fact that “the U.S. continues to fall behind in public education” argument is so readily embraced by so many, including parents of students, suggests there is a receptivity within the general public on this issue.
Everyone’s has a child who’s had one or more “bad teacher” or a professor who’s there only because of tenure and not because of effectiveness. It is commonly accepted that the education system is not doing as good of a job as it could be doing, and we do public education a disservice by denying that fact. It makes “the Resistance” look like sour grapes.
Is there anyone on this blog who does not believe that what’s being done (pre-reform) in their school or their district or their post-secondary institution who does not believe that things could be made to be better? Is there no one here who believes as Sir Ken Robinson does, that we would benefit from a paradigm shift in public education?
We have to fight for what’s better and not merely against what will make things worse. That’s been my singular point in this thread. Perhaps I’m just talking with the wrong group to achieve this. Again, as Bob has pointed out several times, I’m a newcomer and perhaps don’t even belong.
No, I don’t believe we need/needed a Ken Robinson-esque educational paradigm shift.
You belong. And not just because I agree with what you are saying. 🙂
We are not going to change the minds of rabid reformists, and that should not be our goal, hence the name suggestion: the Resistance. As you say, the suggestion to read Diane’s book is not disseminating the message where it needs to be spread–to the general public. However, the fact that most of us had a bad teacher (I didn’t just some that were better than others for me) should not be a call for the need for a general overhaul of public education. I am all for delineating a policy outline that actually fosters a love of learning among other things. I am for continuous growth and improvement in our schools just as I strove for these things in myself and my students. I also think that as more and more people are introduced to CCSS through its accountability arm, we will need a message that defines what schools should and can be as an alternative to the test driven culture being pushed today.
“I am for continuous growth and improvement in our schools just as I strove for these things in myself and my students”
This is exactly what I think is missing from resistance discussions. There is no nuance. Testing is bad, data collection is bad, tying teacher’s performance evaluations to student outcomes is bad, common core is bad (is was good at first, but is now bad), charter schools are bad, we just need more money.
I believe that if the public had the notion and evidence that continuous growth was occurring in public education, we wouldn’t be seeing horrendous evaluation systems and legislative attention to schools. What they see instead is epic resistance to change.
Step outside of public education and look in for a sec. Do you see a profession that is trying to continuously improve itself? Acknowledgement that we could be doing so much better by many students? I don’t see that. I see labeling any possible change as education “deform” with no nuance. That’s what got us into this mess and will continue to make it worse, not better.
That will not be better for kids, but it’s where we’re headed when our educational institutions can’t do what’s best for kids on their own.
This is the beginning of a healthy dialogue *and* of a potentially effective counter movement to #FauxEducationReform.
If “the Resistance’s” message is “everything’s okay here, just leave us alone and move along” I fear the worst for public education’s future.
I don’t bother to ask if anyone has read her book before I suggest they should, and I’ll keep doing it that way. If that causes someone to be irritated, too bad. I’m not sorry.
The real problem is that too many Americans don’t read books. Studies by the book industry—and there are many on an annual basis—reveal that 80% of young people leaving high school, who don’t go to college, never read a book again in their lives.
in addition, almost half of college graduates never read a book again. There are about 317 million people in the US but only 65 million avid adult readers who read, on average, ten books a year.
And what do you think most of those avid readers are reading? Hint, it’s not books like “Reign of Error”.
OK, that’s just disgustingly inappropriate. The current system gives children the school that their parents can afford based on how much house they can buy or how much rent they can pay. Giving low income parents the same choice is economic fairness. Try looking at this from a parent or child’s point of view for just a minute. Give me a break.
No you need to give ME a break.
There are states that support public schools via sales tax (Michigan) and before the reformers got their hands on it, we had federal funding that was supposed to close gaps in property tax-funded school. These days however, those monies are awarded to high-testing schools in “Race to the Top” schematics. Savvy schools know that good test scores depend on having more students from two-parent families who speak English at home. And the higher the scores, the more federal funding each district is awarded.
This is what’s disgustingly inappropriate.
My comments were about being equated to Nazis.
Saying that the word “Choice” is the “Zeig Heil” of the fake reform movement isn’t exactly out-and-out equating Educationologists with Nazis. I have to say though, it is a very apt comparison in terms of total top-down system obedience, extreme retaliative punishment of educator, parent & student dissent and outcomes that intentionally create homogeneity by ghettoizing & discriminating against a significant portion of the student population.
Sorry that the comparison bothers you though.
There is nothing more “bottom up” than a parent choosing the best school for their child.
@ jpr
Parents are free to spend additional money to send their children to private schools or to home-school them. What they should not be able to do is use public money to give priority to their children by privatizing and hybridizing (i.e. kicking out the students they identify as “lesser”) at the local public school that was built to serve everyone.
This is how school choice works and “bottom up” or not, it is wrong and it is going to stop.
The parents of my students aren’t “free to spend additional money to send their children to private school”. They’re too busy trying to pay for food and shelter. They deserve better than their neighborhood schools are giving them, but I suppose you want them to “take one for the team” with their kids.
It’s a great notion that the local public school was “built to serve everyone”, but it isn’t working.
I’m not sure but I would like to think that everyone on this thread, if not everyone who reads this blog (whether regularly or not) wants the same thing: Truly great public education for all. I remember having debates with my wife, also an educator, about both the magnet school and TAG programs in the City of Alexandria twenty-five years ago, and the importance of elevating the quality of public education for all and not for just some.
I have an overarching issue with charters because they accelerate the systemic decline of public education: The most-motivated parents and arguably most-talented students flee to the charters, where they receive more attention than the schools they’re leaving, and the most-challenged students are left behind to be educated by a decaying public education system with dwindling resources and even less public confidence. Studies have shown that charters increase segregation in schools and they oftentimes puff their performance by screening out those not destined for achievement and/or those allowed in who subsequently don’t perform. There are also plenty of posers, although there are also some exceptional charters.
At the same time, the proliferation of charters in the U.S. is primarily due to the fact that parents and students feel the public education system is failing them both. It is hard to fault either a parent who wants the best education for their child or the educator who wants to teach in an environment where they feel that can be most-effective and where there efforts are supported. If charters were allowed as part of the grand laboratory for genuine public education reform, with the notion that the best concepts would be integrated district-wide, I might feel differently about them.
This discussion, albeit an important one, is beyond the scope of what was a simple suggestion in this blog post: What should this “movement” be called?
There are certainly a lot of bad charters; no argument from me there.
2% of the kids in my school passed their 3rd or 4th grade state exams, so if we’re taking the most talented students, we’re not very good at it. Also, I think many parents choose our school because of the long school day, which allows them to work without having kids home alone after school.
The Boston charter school study compared students who went to charters with students who applied, but were waitlisted, and found much better results for the students who went to the charters. Diane has pointed out that there is some bias here because only the best charters have waitlists, but I have yet to hear her acknowledge the value of the best charters nor anything that she believes can be learned from them.
For me though, the issue is closer to home. My District schools are showing little inclination to change despite extremely high drop out rates. I’m afraid that a lot of the rhetoric regarding charters selecting students and kicking out low performers is made up as a rationalization for higher performance. If you believe it’s a trick, you don’t have to look at whether low SES students need longer school days, or teachers with different skill sets, etc. For me, throwing all charters out along with all testing, etc. is part of the denial that has led us to where we are.
Gee. There seem to be an awful lot of protests against closing neighborhood schools and replacing them with charters. As to bad public schools, ask yourself why they tend to be concentrated in poor communities. Why are charters not routinely outperforming public schools? Why are charters, if they are so wonderful, not being embraced by suburban communities? Why is school performance most closely tied to socioeconomic class? I know that inner city schools are not anywhere near as well resourced as my community schools. I know the kids that enter school in my community have been exposed to an environment rich in opportunity. I know the kids entering school in my community are well fed and well housed. I know they receive easily accessible health care. I know their parents are not unemployed or holding down multiple jobs just to keep a roof over their heads. These are not excuses; they are realities. We need to address these issues on a societal level and not expect the schools to be able to overcome these inequities. That doesn’t mean we don’t try; it just means we don’t punish schools for not being able to produce test scores according to an arbitrary rubric that ignores the impact of out of school factors that have a much greater impact than in-school factors. Public schools should not be the whipping boy for all of society’s woes.
@ jpr
The parents of your students aren’t free to spend MY money to send their children to a private school either. I’m sorry you think your public school is failing, but you don’t have to delve into “they’re just trying to pay for food and shelter” martyrdom on that point.
You know, there are many many ways to improve your school without sacrificing some for the all or stealing from the public till, but to make them work you have to uphold the value of the “public good.” Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like you really believe in it.
@jpr Are you saying that you work at a school with a 50% dropout rate, or are you making a general statement?
No, the district high school in my city has the 50% drop out rate.
But you work at a Charter school, is that correct?
No, I started one, but it’s always been a volunteer effort for me, not a job (though my wife thinks otherwise since it’s about 20 hours a week).
I see. How does a student gain entry into the charter you helped start?
First come, first served. If there were more takers than spots by lottery day, they’d be chosen randomly.
Too bad. That’s not OK.
@JPR
Actually I checked, and your charter school’s on-line enrollment form is dated for school year 2009-10.
I guess it was first come, first serve about four years ago?
My school has always been first come, first served. We haven’t had to have a lottery yet, and I’m actually glad about that since I don’t want to see parents who want their children in the school be denied a place.
I’m not sure what the point is that you’re making. Incoming 5th graders at my school perform quite a bit lower than the District average. Last year, less than 10% of our incoming students passed their 4th grade exams.
JPR, sounds like a good charter school.
Diane,
We’re not without our challenges, but we’re proud of what we are and we’re always trying to be better.
-jpr
And the attrition rate at your charter is 50%
If you’d like to get into a discussion of my particular school and accurate statistics for it, please feel free to contact me directly. I have purposely not disclosed the area I’m in nor the District schools that I’ve mentioned because I don’t think it’s helpful to the debate.
Many charter schools have high attrition rates, and I don’t believe that a school with high attrition rates is a successful school. But it’s important to look at who is leaving and why. It’s a complex issue, and one that I and my school spend a lot of time analyzing. I would be more than happy to discuss details of it with you one on one at your convenience.
Also, our area has an over 10% mobility rate of students (higher for the low SES and racial minority students that charters disproportionately serve), which adds up to almost 50% over a 4 year period all by itself. Like many charters, we don’t enroll in upper grades, which I acknowledge makes our scores in upper grades not directly comparable to District schools, who have to accept students into all grades at any time. But, a large part of that issue is social promotion in lower grades and a big drop in student performance between grades 4 and 8 in our city.
I am really interested in the reasons for a drop in performance during those years between 4th and eighth grade. I suspect that as kids become more oriented to the outside world, those influences become more important. It would also be interesting to examine how the curriculum changes over those years and whether it is a cumulative deficit that finally catches up with the kids or whether there is a place where kids hit a wall. This is not just an inner city, low SES phenomena. While a district in a high SES community might continually spit out high scoring students, a group of kids begin to struggle. As an old special ed teachers, I know this is a time when the kids on the cusp begin to fall behind, but it is not just an issue of learning challenges. I don’t think there are any easy answers, but we can’t ignore the problem.
2old2teach,
It’s certainly a complex issue. I think 5th-6th grade is definitely a bit of a turning point for kids behavior-wise, when they start to make more independent decisions.
I also think that a lot of kids are promoted with deficits, especially in reading, writing, and vocabulary. They are allowed to skate through until the years when the material gets much harder, and these deficits stack the deck against them adapting.
I’m no expert, but I think the issues we face locally in middle and high schools have a lot to do with students who never learned to read adequately, let alone write. It *has* to be easier to solve that problem in K-4 than it is to solve it later in life.
Certainly, high quality universal pre-K should help. I think it’s worth investigating a 2-year intensive reading program as a replacement for 3rd grade for students who are far behind at that point.
Society pays for this many times over in future interventions. It seems there has to be a better solution.
My teaching experience has been mostly with jr. high and high school as a special education teacher, so I definitely have seen the skill deficits in content that should have been mastered in elementary school. Granted, I was dealing with special needs students (mostly L.D.), but holding these students back is likely to result in an even earlier departure from schooling (supported by research). If we can manage to light a fire under them and give them the support they need (is it humanly possible?), maybe we can at least set them on a trajectory that keeps them moving forward. After just hearing that my state has further cut back on funding for special ed, it’s hard to stay positive. I do not see the fascination with standardized testing as doing anything but further demoralizing students like the ones I taught. Too many of them already have daily reminders that they don’t measure up. There is not enough grit in the world to keep most of us moving ahead if there is a hurricane of frustration hitting us in the face.
I agree 100%. The fact that NYS rolled out common core aligned state tests without figuring out what to do with special education students who are far below grade level is a tragedy. I’m no believer in opt out, but if my children were in that situation, we definitely would have done that.
On the other hand, I think way too many kids, low SES especially, are classified (23% in my community), which then locks in low expectations for them.
This is why I am a supporter of charters as a concept. We have to be trying new things, and I don’t see district schools being able to do it.
I’ve seen tremendous joy in learning, followed by a deep understanding of the need to work hard and the promise of education to improve their lives in low SES students in great charter schools. I’ve seen lots of kids declassified after a couple of years of intense remediation possible because of the longer school day and year.
One other, slightly unrelated point: I’ve seen kids who weren’t turning in homework start doing it because their parents didn’t want to be annoyed by phone calls from the school every day that it wasn’t turned in. 20 years ago, this wasn’t necessary. Many schools believe this isn’t their job and blame everything on uninvolved parents. But, this is a prime example of how schools can partially compensate for missing parental support. Having school end at 5pm is another. I don’t care if a parent chooses my school because it’s free baby sitting. At least that child is having productive, vs. destructive hours after the traditional schools day ends. I’ve learned not to judge my kid’s parents as I don’t live in their shoes. And I certainly think we owe it kids to do everything we can to get them where they need to be over the course of their k-12 education regardless of where they are coming from.
My school day used to start at 7AM and typically didn’t end until 5PM and that was just in the building time. Class didn’t start for over an hour, but it was a good time to get organized without interruption. I got 40 minutes off for lunch which was usually at my desk, with students or in a meeting. Because of extra responsibilities I only had a planning period 2 or 3days/week. I nearly killed myself. Was it dedication or stupidity? Probably something in between. I was driven. Evenings and weekends typically involved school tasks. It used to take hours to write weekly lesson plans coded to state standards with attached essential questions all in a prescribed format. The district hadn’t made AYP in years, so there were always lots of extra hoops through which we were expected to jump to prove that we were serious about improving. I’m sure you understand the frustration of being required to reach some arbitrary standard across the board using arbitrary measures. The freedom accorded charters is very appealing. (I would have burned myself out for one which apparently is all too common.) It would be more appealing if that freedom was extended to teachers. I don’t take well to shaming and I am not good at lockstep prescriptions. I’m not good at wiggling my fingers at kids, and giving a kid demerits for an untucked shirttail and other minor infractions that might lead to fines…My father, who was a successful businessman, was shirttail challenged. My mother used to threaten him with sewing lace to the tails. With the population with which I dealt, I know there were kids whose “disabilities” could have been remediated if they had been addressed aggressively when they were younger. How does a child get to high school reading at a first grade level? I can paint the scenarios and you can, too. There is more than enough blame to go around in and out of school. Charters have been given a chance to address these issues but I would be surprised if many of my students ended up in a charter. For those who had parents who advocated for them perhaps some of them would have made it, most likely in a less militant variation of a charter. Many of them would be the dropouts shunted back into the public schools. The way success is defined these days, they would take too much investment for a charter to risk taking them as students. A few students were so broken and aggressive they were essentially on lockdown. Others chose the streets at least for a time. I wonder how many would qualify as PTSD? Maybe fewer than I think since their whole lives were consumed with traumatic stress. What is post traumatic stress if such stress is a chronic?
I can’t even remember why I started writing this post. Sorry for rambling.
2old2teach,
Like almost all special education teachers that I’ve met, you’re truly emotional about your kids. Nowhere is the “one size fits all” approach to education more of a problem than with those students. I think they also suffer the most from rigid, legislated prescriptions for what they need for resources (some probably necessary to keep them from getting short changed, though some stifling to teachers who know the kids best).
Our district has some great SE and ELL programs that I am very glad exist in our community. It’s unfortunate that charters are restricted from cooperating to serve these children, as most of us just don’t have enough students with any particular need to most effectively provide services. As a result, many kids have to get transported for services, which takes a chunk out of their day, or get whichever provider the district sends over on a given day, which at the very least is inconsistent.
As you said, we all face challenges and all need to be better.
Yes it IS important to look at the reasons for school “failure” and the fact that you extend that courtesy to your own failing charter school (and yes I know which one it is) while hypocritically pointing a non-analytic finger at the public school whose funding you are siphoning just proves how morally corrupt and your corporate values really are.
bitchencamero,
Why is it we’re never accused of “siphoning” students?
If it’s just about money, then the math clearly shows that the district has *more* money to spend per student as a result of charter schools, not less. As you probably know, we get $14072 per student, which is thousands less than the District spends per student. Each student that goes to a charter enables the district to spend more on the remaining students, not less. If every student in the District went to a charter (not something I’m a proponent of), the District would have no students and $80 million a year in revenue.
Most districts in our area have no charters are struggling financially quite a bit more than our city, yet the city continues to blame charters for their fiscal woes.
No doubt, we need more education funding, but taking money away from charter students to give more to non-charter students isn’t right. Our students are not worth less.
jpr,
Do the charter students as a group have the same percentage of ESL, special education, and other disadvantaged students? Of course you must know that not every student really costs the state the same amount of money to educate — many receive special services that would not be included in the cost of educating a child that does not require such.
It may be that charters in your district receive less money per student because they have gone the “more cost effective” route of opting not to educate many children with special needs.
Diane no doubt has better knowledge than I of any times in our history when the public schools also chose to take this more cost effective route. It is my understanding that those times did happen, though. They are not really an option now (for the public schools, anyway). That might be a good thing, but it is probably not a “cost effective” one.
Does the charter pay the operational costs or just instructional? If the district is responsible, then what you get per pupil is actually much higher. I know, we are going to end up debating whether charters are public schools. I’m on the “not so much side” for the reasons that have been stated on this blog in the past. Eva certainly is giving NYC charters a bad name.
@jpr You ARE accused of siphoning students. We prefer the term ‘Cherry-picking.’
Charter school money that comes from the public purse is NOT yours to exploit. The remaining students have LESS, not more as a result of every penny you steal. Nice try with the fuzzy math.
You have a limited amount of time to return that money to the real schools before our movement passes legislation to compel you to do so.
In the mean time keep jumping that shark. I hear it’s all the rage in New York.
You don’t seem interested in the actual data, whether it be the math that shows the true financial effect of charters on the district or the test results that show our incoming kids perform considerably lower on their NYS tests last year then the district average and more of them are from economically disadvantaged families as well.
I can’t speak for other charters, but if we’re “cherry picking”, we’re terrible at it. The data shows that the cherry picking is effectively happening geographically, with uptown schools inadvertently selecting their students based on their parent’s ability to pay rent or afford a house.
Please consider the source of your “information”.
@jpr
The source of my information is 100 percent legit. It comes from real ledgers, from committed educators and from parents who are no longer threatened by the false fear about “failing” schools.
I am making it my personal mission to confront people like you; people who espouse moonbat theories about how public education is failing (it isn’t), how the idea of a free public education for all American children is a far-fetched (it’s not) and how taking money away from public education for hybrid un-monitored charter schools somehow leaves more money behind to spend on remaining students – give me a break. Have you actually listened to yourself?!?
Do you realize you are bragging about your low performing charter students in an effort to cull my sympathy and win me over? That’s pathetic. Gee look at how BAD last year’s incoming charter students are, you say, which negates an earlier admission that your school didn’t have an incoming class last year.
Your days of being a Robber Barron on the public purse and rendering more children into the “have not” column are coming to a close.
“Confronting me” with unsubstantiated opinion isn’t effective. You said we cherry pick students; the data says otherwise. I give you that data and you say I”m bragging about how low my incoming students are? That makes no sense. I’m glad we’re serving the students who need us the most.
You say we cost the district money per student; the facts say otherwise. I show you the math and you offer no counter-argument. Look at the percentage of the budget sent to charter schools and look at the percentage of the student population in them (and yes, charters have fewer SE and ELL kids, but they have more low SES kids as well).
As for “unmonitored”, we lost count after 47 types of audits in our first few years. We have to prove every 5 years that we are better than the schools around us or be shut down (and you’ve seen several shut down, so you know that’s true). Our audited financials are publicly available on the web, as are our 990s.
I spend 20 hours a week in this volunteer position and spend lots of my own money on the school and the kids. If I’m a “robber baron”, I’m terrible at that as well. And if you consider the lower amount of money that we’re spending educating the least well off in our city “stealing”, then yes, I’m “stealing” the education these kids deserve for them.
I absolutely believe in a free, public education for *all* American children and am part of the solution to making that work for all. Your “personal mission” no doubt includes working to shut down the schools chosen by >20% of parents in our community for their kids.
JPR, it would help to substantiate your claim that your charter school doesn’t cherry pick students if you provided the name of your school. Your assertions prove nothing. A disinterested observer would want to know the proportion of students with disabilities and English language learners as compared to the nearby public schools. They would want to know the attrition rate. They would want to know the teacher attrition rate. Before boasting about your charter, name it.
Diane,
I was responding to one particular person who has access to the data for my school and can verify what I say. I don’t expect any reader to consider what I say as any more credible than what others say, and I expect that quite a few won’t believe anything that comes from someone associated with a charter school, which is certainly their prerogative.
I’m not boasting about my charter. I’ve posted a lot on this forum and I have never once talked about our graduation rates or academic performance. I agree that such data is worth little in the absence of additional data such as percentages SE, ELL, and ED and attrition. I also believe that every school has room for improvement.
Forum posts aren’t conducive to nuanced discussions about such things. That’s also why I haven’t named any of the district schools that I’ve mentioned. I also don’t think some of your readers can be considered an objective audience.
I enjoy the substantial discussions that I have on the forum with those who engage with respect. The most interesting discussions happen with people who I may not agree with, and I learn from them as I hope they sometimes learn something from me.
Shame on me for falling down the rat hole of engaging one particular person. I prefer to discuss policies and education, not indulge personal attacks. I should learn to just ignore such things.
@jpr
Your argument is no different than the one made in 1957 when >20% of parents at Central High School in Little Rock wanted to keep that school white.
Also, I am not impressed by your martyrdom of volunteering and spending your own money toward an endeavor that is unfair at its core.
Jump that shark for *all* American children (nice asterisks on the word all btw) while you can.
post note: if your charter’s financials are available on the web, I see no reason why you shouldn’t post them here.
bitchencamero,
If you’re really interested in any of the data, please reach out to me personally and I will steer you to every bit of it. But if you just want to argue publicly for the sake of argument, I opt out.
I see. So you won’t identify your charter school or its data, though you will hold that school up as an ideal and talk about it in your comments.
OK. Who needs credibility – not you I guess.
bitchencamero,
I looked back in the posts to see if there was one place where I “hold [my] school up as an ideal” and couldn’t find it.
@jpr
If you want us to take seriously ANY opinion on the charter school you helped start, you must identify the school and make its stats known.
In other words, put up or shut up.
Jpr used to annoy me all get out. He has toned down his rhetoric substantially. I still don’t agree with his response to the public school inadequacies/troubles, but I also know that funding for poor districts tends to be inadequate and complaints are too often ignored or dismissed. Charters as a whole have not lived up to their promise, but I can appreciate the frustration that can drive some to a charter as a viable solution. I totally reject the charter that is designed to feed the greed of investors. Perhaps you have evidence to the contrary, but I do not see jpr as such a bottom feeder. I am guilty of the same sin as jpr in relying on my own personal narrative to explain my thoughts. I know I don’t have all the answers; I think perhaps jpr does not feel he has a monopoly on truth either. There are many of us who protect ourselves with pseudonyms. As long as no one sets themselves up as the arbiter of all truth and goodness, I don’t find it legitimate to demand full disclosure. Is it impossible to agree to disagree on charters and maybe find common ground with other facets of the debate?
@ 2old2teach
Some people can appreciate the frustration that can drive some to a charter as a viable solution, but I am not some people. I’ve had enough.
As long as JPR cites his upstate charter and all the voluntary hours and money he puts toward it, and as long as he continues to justify parental choice for the few at the expense of the many as a solution to “failure” I will continue to ask him for specific details.
When it comes to the health and welfare of children there is no comprise. So I am sorry but I cannot agree to disagree.
The last community I worked in successfully fought off a Gates funded initiative that would have targeted the top tier, college bound students at the high school. The school worked very hard to provide for these motivated students and would have lost a large portion of their student leadership. While such an enterprise could wow with the latest in technological innovations and equipment, I wonder if it could have provided those more intangible opportunities for growth that these students gained as the leaders of their school. I know that if they had succeeded in opening, many would not have been able to resist the bells and whistles. If I had a child who was a potential student for this charter, I would have had a hard time deciding especially if that child was interested. (I knew nothing about Bill Gates’ educational interests at that time.) As I said, personal experience greatly influences perception.
Somehow I got the impression that jpr’s charter was in NYC. I know that the drain of charters on rural and small urban areas can be substantial, but am really not well versed in NY since I don’t live there. Your anger is deep and I cannot judge you for it; I might very well feel the same. I really like the old adage: ” Don’t judge a man, until you have walked a mile in his shoes.”
@2old2teach
I’m kind of confused – are you saying that you wonder if the Gates-funded initiative that failed could have provided intangible opportunities, or are you saying that the initiative would have eliminated such opportunities?
I’m saying that the kids might have lost intangible opportunities they had as leaders in the high school if they had gone to the charter.
@2old2teach
If they had gone to the charter – if they had been accepted at the charter and if the charter didn’t find a reason to kick them back to public school. So many ifs.
JPR’s school is in New York – but not NYC. What I am asking him to do is no different than his demands that Ms. Ravitch to back up her claims with facts. For example, in the comments for the March 5th blog post (3/11/14 at 10:40 am) he says regarding charter schools:
“I agree that the data should be available, but generally is not. However, charters and districts have to honor FOIL requests, so it should be possible to compare. I think the onus to do this should be on people who say, without such comparative data, that charter schools “can kick students out at will” as Diane said above. Since it is illegal to do so (at least in my state), she should be able to provide data (preferably nationwide since she appears to be painting all charters with this brush) to back up what she says.”
Of course Ms. Ravitch does exactly that. Now it’s his turn.
I’m angry because I’m paying attention.
“If they had gone to the charter – if they had been accepted at the charter and if the charter didn’t find a reason to kick them back to public school. So many ifs.”
Do you realize that you just took the charter’s side? I was pointing out the intangible advantages of attending the public high school that might be lost if they attended the charter. I am giving you my reasons for not being in favor of this particular charter.
Uh no. I didn’t take the charter’s side.
Do you understand that I wasn’t either?
yes that’s why I asked for clarification
I think we’re on the same page now. 🙂
April 8, 12:36pm jpr tempered his responses. On charters, we disagree but he can allow me to have strong reservations about charters and I can allow that he is sincere in his belief about his charter. I think there is room for productive dialogue on lots of issues and neither one of us is a fan of profit driven charters or the reform forces that seem to be determined to privatize public education. Testing, CCSS, teacher evaluation,data mining and privacy rights, data driven prescriptive instruction,…there are lots of topics that are equally important. I think jpr can add to the discussion; sometimes our conversations have gotten rather redundant and we sound too much like a mutual admiration society.
Bottom line? I don’t think he is here to subvert the process by pushing the charter agenda, nor do I think all charters are bad. Helen Gym, the powerful advocate for Philadelphia public schools, is the founder of a charter school.
2old2teach,
Thank you for that. FYI, I am not a supporter of for-profit charters either nor of the privatization agenda that a few charter supporters ascribe to.
I follow what I believe is a need for change on behalf of children. If I felt that could be accomplished through the school district, I would do it there. I’ve tried, and found lots of well-meaning people, but a lot of systems that resist change. It seems that everyone in public education has painted themselves into a corner of the room, with no way to meet in the middle around what is best for kids. Everyone is so mistrustful of everyone else,and the institutional roles conflict in ways that the individuals never would. It’s actually quite disappointing, and I know lots of district educators feel the same way.
I support a lot of the initiatives that my local district is doing and try to call out the things they are doing right whenever I can. But it makes me angry on behalf of my students when people say that there are no issues in public education and that schools bear no responsibility for poor outcomes for low SES children.
I try relentlessly to work collaboratively with our district for the betterment of all of our students without success. We’ve had much better luck collaborating nearby suburban schools, presumably because we are more useful to the district as an “enemy” than they perceive we could be as a friend.
My own kids are in an awesome public, district school that I simply couldn’t be happier with. I was able to give them that because I have a great career and can afford a house here. Many of the parents of the kids in my school simply don’t have that luxury, either because they can’t afford it, or need access to public transportation, etc.
I understand that bitchencamero is defending against what she sees as an attack on her kid’s schools, or her neighbor’s schools, or something like that, but I don’t think there’s a call for such personal vehemence. It’s fine to disagree with me or think I’m misguided, It’s fine to ask for sources for data or ask me to defend a position I’ve taken. But is it necessary to insult me, imply I steal money from children, get rich off my community, or any of the other nonsense earlier in this thread? I don’t think so.
Diane has set up this forum as “A site to discuss better education for all”. I like to represent a viewpoint that some on this blog don’t think exists; that of a progressive liberal who started a charter school in the best interests of students as a logical extension of 25 years of service to low SES kids in my community. I find that productive conversations can be had when people get past stereotypes, but I guess not everyone is capable of that.
I appreciate your commenting.
@jpr
“I find that productive conversations can be had when people get past stereotypes, but I guess not everyone is capable of that.”
I find that productive conversations can be had when people back up what they say with real data – such as the name of the much cited phantom charter school and district.
@jpr
I can take the predictable offendedness & complaining that I’m engaging in straw man attacks and that I’m against choice and don’t want poor parents to have good schools for their children etc … It’s all misdirection.
What is the name of “your” charter school?
Let’s hear it.
Where else is this blog about a single school? Where else is there such a personal attack?
I’m sure there are some on this blog who enjoy watching you play “poke the charter supporter”, but I think most are here to discuss ideas , not indulge in personal attacks.
How about sharing your name, job, which neighborhood you live in, whether you have kids, and if so, where they go to school? I don’t really want to know these things and you’re entitled, just as anyone else is, to post your opinions without disclosing those things.
Oh, and please also include where you learned how to spell bitchin’ and Camaro. Thanks.
@jpr When people complain about charter schools on this blog you are often the first to jump in and defend the charter movement. You talk about the charter that you helped found and you make many claims and references to its students, parents, test scores, socioeconomic traits, how your wife feels about the number of volunteer hours you dedicate to this charter school and on and on …
There’s no logical reason why you be shocked that somebody here finally asked you to name this oft cited school. It is the backbone of your school choice argument. You are not being persecuted JPR. You are being asked to name the school.
I live in Chicago. Our local elementary school was closed by the city last year (over the protests of MOST voters here) and reopened as a magnet cluster school. Although the school’s admissions are boundary-based, almost overnight our neighborhood streets became permit-parking only, and the school’s grim rent-a-cops have replaced our pleasant crossing guards. I’m getting nonstop literature about the benefits of the new school and the loudest claim is that its students will be more “competitive in the workplace.” Honestly – 7 year olds – workplace competitiveness.
Enough is enough.
Keep bitchen, bc. I live in a tony suburb of Chicago that is unlikely to have a charter invade. The reform agenda has reared its head very subtly, but the alarm bells are not audible yet. In your circumstances, I would have just about as much sympathy for jpr. Even though he reminds us that his own children attend excellent public schools, he is pretty adamant about the righteousness of his school. There is nothing righteous about what Rahm and his cohort have done in Chicago. You are right that it would be nice to have a lot more information about his charter. I am already opposed to diversion of taxpayer money to charter schools. I think I remember Diane saying that when put to a referendum, voters have never approved the establishment of charters at tax payer expense. That is probably why they tried to frame choice as a civil rights issue, implying that it was morally right to support them. Hogwash. As I said, bc, keep bitchen. If nothing else it will hone your argument and that is only to our benefit. If this sounds condescending, forgive me. I need you to balance my belief in Wonderland.
@2old2teach
I don’t want to balance your belief in Wonderland- I want to support it. I believe in it too.
Yeah JPR is pretty adamant about the righteousness of his charter school, which is why I think questioning him on the specifics and demanding actual data is the right thing to do. I wish I weren’t so alone in this endeavor.
You know, I was one of the many kids in the mid 70’s bused to a different school to affect racial and educational inequality. I think, what was all of that work for? What’s happened to our shared value that ALL public schools should be interchangeably excellent? Let’s bring it back.
Solidarity man
bitchencamaro,
I’m sorry to hear about your local elementary school (truly). It sounds like you got the opposite of parent choice. I am not an advocate of closing schools by fiat if parents still want their children to be there. IMO, the best policy is as much transparency as possible about all schools and an informed public making choices.
I also am not defending the “charter school movement” except the notion of flexibility and parental choice. There are good charters and bad, and there are good charter policies and bad.
If you look back at the posts, you’ll see that I didn’t mention any of the specifics about my school until after you accused me of a lot of things based on your personal experiences. I’m not sure how I could respond to “robber baron” without pointing out that I’m a volunteer, or to “cherry picking” without discussing incoming scores. You attacked me without data and without knowing me. I’m not sure what else I should have done other than perhaps ignore it.
My reason for being on this blog is that I think many people believe that all charter schools exist for the purposes of privatization and other nefarious reasons. Mine doesn’t. Lots of others don’t. I expect that some people believe me when I say that and some don’t, which is fine.
You asking me to name my school and to turn the conversation into something specific about that would be the same as me posting data about your school and questioning your credibility based on that. I just don’t want to turn this into something personal, and it is not in the best interests of the kids in my school to make it about their school either. I have an opinion, I express it, and people are free to ignore it, believe it, not believe it, etc.
I understand your frustration, but you don’t know me, and I think you’ve ascribed a lot of traits to me that I don’t have. I’ve been volunteering for the same low SES kids for 30 years, and it’s a very personal mission for me. I hope you can understand why I would be unhappy at being accused of somehow profiting out of this or being in it to somehow hurt the children that I’m very dedicated to serving.
Two other comments:
– I thought you were local here, and some of my comments to you reflected that. Most charter opponents in my very segregated city have kids in schools that are low SES and low minority. They are unhappy that charters exist, but the charters frankly don’t exist for their kids. Most of them have never been in the low SES schools, nor would they ever send there own kids there. My comments about the district making money on charters obviously apply to my local situation as well.
-I’m curious, is the “magnet cluster school” a charter, or is that something the city created? I’m sorry to hear about the changes to your neighborhood.
@jpr
I travel to Albany/Troy on biz from time to time so I am familiar with NY charters and the current funding controversy. You refer obliquely to your school and its data, but you do drop-in more details than I suspect you’re aware, so I (and a few others here) have deduced which charter school you’re involved with.
You have claimed that your charter operates on a first-come-first-serve egalitarian basis, so why are you telling me above that charters exist for some kids but not others? You wrote, “… but the charters frankly don’t exist for their kids.” Charters are funded on the public purse, so why in this instance are you advocating choice for the few instead of the whole? This is a reasonable question.
You also claim that, “many people believe that all charter schools exist for the purposes of privatization and other nefarious reasons. Mine doesn’t.” How does your school avoid this common pitfall? Right now the latest nefarious hoo-ha in the news is about upstate NY charter schools awarding contracts to a testing and data company that just so happens to be owned by the charter board members. It’s hard to find any news about charters getting it right. If your school is one of the few, what’s the secret to your success?
I’m asking you because your school’s data that is supposed to be openly available on the web is actually available by formal request only. According to what I’ve read, data requests are directed to and fulfilled by designated school authorities – one of whom is you – is that correct?
Also, although the data is mostly unavailable I do know that a significant number of your charter school students have returned to the public schools and accusations of cherry-picking the better students go back a few years, according to articles in the Times Union. I didn’t just make that up.
Look, the questions I’m asking are simple, reasonable and would be expected from any local journalist on the education beat.
Chicago’s new magnet clusters are supposed to be the same as neighborhood schools with the added bonus of a longer school day and a special focus such as fine arts or math. So far however, that special focus is undeliverable because the common core curriculum is in play. We’ve started calling these schools “Magnet cluster-fu*ks.”
@bitchencamero,
Our school is first come, first serve. What I meant by charters “frankly don’t exist for their kids” is that our purpose is to serve low-SES kids. That’s written into the charter law, and written into our authorizer’s criteria for opening a school. I also meant it as referring to our demographics, which are very high low SES and very high racial minorities.
Question re avoiding conflicts of interest, financial benefit for Board members…
We have a strict conflict of interest policy that applies to all employees and Board members, Our authorizer requires annual signed statements from every Board member disclosing any potential conflicts and actions that were taken to avoid them. To date, we have not had any disclosable conflicts as we would rather avoid any semblance of an issue. We are also monitored for this by one accounting company that we work with during the year and another that does our annual audits. I don’t agree that that makes us one of the “few” as I think most charters follow the law, but I agree there are examples of those that don’t, as there are of those District schools that don’t as well. All our finances, Board minutes, Board meetings, etc. are public, as are our 990s. We’re subject to FOIL as well. There is also the new NY Nonprofit Revitalization act that applies to us and has quite a few requirements.
Yes, our data is publicly available, and if you would like to contact me via the school, I’ll provide it. If you’d like to stop by during a visit sometime, we can do that as well. I’m just not going to respond to it as one anonymous person posting to another anonymous person on a blog.
You are absolutely right that there have been unsubstantiated allegations of cherry picking better students made against every charter in our area. There has been zero evidence of this. If I’m not mistaken, there was one case of one person in one charter here (not mine) that asked a student to leave and they were disciplined and were no longer working at that charter at the time the article about it was printed. it’s a frequent criticism, but that doesn’t make it valid. The source of many of these rumors is vehemently anti-charter and has had to retract some of these statements in the past.
I can’t speak for the other charters, but I’ve got to believe that, if something like that were going on, there would be interviews with offended parents, and the District would be providing data (actual numbers, not vague allegations) of kids coming back. This hasn’t happened and they have not done that.
As for kids going back to District schools, there are some, and that is part of choice. We look diligently at who is leaving and why. We have adjusted policies over time to decrease attrition that we have any control over, and it has gone down each year since we opened. Please keep in mind that over 20% of students in our community have opted not to go to District schools, so holding on to students something everyone needs to work on.
Your questions *are* 100% reasonable, and I would have the discussion with any local reporter, and have many times before. I would have the same discussion with any local community member, and would even have the discussion with you in Chicago one on one. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss one particular school on a blog; especially one that has a clear bias against charter schools and a long history of cherry picking data to support positions as opposed to being objective. Obviously spending time on this blog makes me somewhat a glutton for punishment, but I don’t enjoy that part of it, nor do I think it’s productive.
Again, I’m not saying charters are *the* answer. I’m not saying my charter is the best school around. I’m not saying that a parent in my community should send their child to my school (though I think they should look at it and make their own decision). I’m not saying that we don’t have any challenges.
I’m participating here as a person who has dedicated a lot of time to these topics and has an opinion that I believe I’m entitled to share. I *know* a lot of people here don’t agree with some of what I believe. I also know that we have more in common that most probably think. If I have any agenda on this blog, it’s to represent politically liberal and progressive people who are involved in charters because of the community they serve and the mission. My experience is that includes most charter teachers, staff, and Board, and volunteers. I’m sure there are examples otherwise, but to read so much on this blog you would think charter schools are where billionaires make money by not educating students; that is just not the case.
Frankly, I think I have more nuanced opinions about education reform issues than many people. I like more rigorous standards. I agree that NYS testing is horrendous. I like teacher accountability in concept, but agree that most implementations are horrible. I like school choice, but understand why some people don’t. I’m not anti-union, but I judge anything related to education by it’s effect on kids and find the specific unions I know most about lacking (I support UAW organization in NC for example). I like my charter school, but I can tell you that just about everyone who has actually been there and seen it comes away liking it too. I just don’t like being painted with broad brush regarding privatization, making money of charters, etc. I believe those things to be by far the exception of high performing charters.
I like having meaningful conversations about these topics, especially with people I don’t agree with as I am open to learning and open to changing my mind. My position on many of these things has evolved over time and will continue to. Anyone who thinks charters, TFA, teacher evaluations, student assessments, etc. have *no* redeeming qualities doesn’t really interest me, because it tells me they are not objective and are pursuing ideology ahead of knowledge.
I think we’ve kind of beaten a dead horse here, and it’s school vacation week starting tomorrow, so I’m going to lay off. Please reach out to me directly if you want more info.
‘I am very disappointed by your non-response response Mr. Reilly.
P.S.
bit is for “bit rate”
chen is my middle name
and camero because I let the 6 year old type it in for me
🙂
Here;s a link to a piece dated August 2013 that appeared in The Washington Post about the Gallup Poll I mentioned.
“Poll: Most Americans unfamiliar with new Common Core teaching standards”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/poll-most-americans-unfamiliar-with-new-common-core-teaching-standards/2013/08/20/ffacc0d6-09b9-11e3-8974-f97ab3b3c677_story.html
bitchencamero,
“I’m sorry you think your public school is failing.”
Well, I’m sorry you think that a school with a 50% drop out rate is anything but. Where do those kids go after dropping out? What effect does that have on our community? There are more African Americans of college age in jail then in college, but you think public education is doing just fine.
You seem more concerned with the “institution” of public education than with the students or the purpose.
“Well, I’m sorry you think that a school with a 50% drop out rate is anything but. Where do those kids go after dropping out? What effect does that have on our community? There are more African Americans of college age in jail then in college, but you think public education is doing just fine.”
Do you really think that those students are dropping because their classes and teachers suck? It is a convenient and juvenile excuse ( they are juveniles) even if it is occasionally true. Look beyond the classroom and ask yourself what other factors play into a high dropout rate. I would contend that the dropout rate is a symptom of societal issues much more than it is of school failure. No doubt there are awful schools, awful teachers, awful administrators,… They still do not single-handedly drive the dropout problem at your school or likely any other school. Draining resources from the public schools to create a private dual school system is hardly going to improve public schools. We have an obligation to provide a public school system for the public good. I’m not sure that charter-like schools cannot be part of the mix if they are designed to fulfill their original mission. In that sense, they would be incubators for innovative ideas to be tried and then made available to the public schools.
Lots of factors go into the drop out rate, and certainly poverty is a major one, but I don’t see us fixing poverty any time soon by any other means than by education.
What I see is a school system that does not ask much of kids of color, either academically or behaviorally. The kids coast along and get promoted each year regardless of ability, attendance, etc. Then the work gets hard, they start getting bad grades, and they are on track to drop out.
Frankly, it has a lot more to do with 4th graders who can’t read than it does with anything going on at the high school itself. But, it’s a K-12 system that is geared for failure for low SES kids and delivers year after year. The system does not in any way hold itself responsible for this, and has literally no major efforts going on to change it. That’s the part that I find completely unacceptable.
As for District schools learning from charters, it seems too many District educators are busy rationalizing charter performance based on other factors and not interested in learning best practices from charters.
JPR, this may disappoint you, but schools have never fixed poverty. Poverty is fixed by having an economy with jobs that lift people out of poverty.
I don’t disagree that we need to be doing a lot more for poverty. But, K-12 education has an opportunity to make a difference in children’s lives, and communities of poverty are the sums of these individual lives.
I reject that school can’t solve poverty. I certainly see it causing it and sustaining it. A high school with a 50% drop out rate is certainly doing that. But, do you honestly believe that a K-12 system that has these children for (hopefully) 13 or 14 years can’t make a difference for them?
Their parents who are unemployed or underemployed graduated (maybe) from these same schools 5-10 years ago. Couldn’t they have been better prepared? I work in a field with zero unemployment, and there are plenty of those. Are low SES children not capable of getting those jobs? Is it your contention that their deficits are too great at 5 years old? Or that school (especially through extended days and years) can’t compensate for a family situation where not much learning occurs at home?
I’m honestly not sure what you are saying, but my initial reaction is that if you don’t think education can make a difference, I wouldn’t want you teaching my children. Young children are impressionable, and they get messages about their capabilities and futures at both home and school.
What I want for my students is the ability to live fulfilling, choice-filled lives. Most of their parents don’t have that, and very little about that is going to change. But, many of my students have the ability to live up to that challenge and they deserve higher expectations.
See http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/blog/job-losses-persist-less-educated-news-day for how unemployment has varied by educational attainment.
You are in total denial of what teachers and administrators can (and do) contribute to these problems. I’ve heard teachers tell these kids they won’t amount to anything. I’ve seen administrators give books to classes of high SES kids and not to classes with low SES kids in the same school.
I see teachers who believe their job is to keep a modicum of control in the classroom by whatever means necessary, including watching a movie if that will work. I see radically lower expectations for behavior and academics for low SES kids.
Given all that, can you truly say that school can’t make a difference? All I hear is denial that there is an issue and arguing that teaching isn’t as important as I think it is.
Is it really necessary for you to frame all your responses in absolutes? Quit telling me what I believe. I don’t agree with you, but you obviously have had some experiences that have led you to your position. I see problems in public schools; if your version of public schools applied to most public schools, I would be for a drastic makeover. There is no question that the way we fund education is warped and gives the least to those who need the most. Given what you know about charter schools, can you really say that turning education over to the private sector is the way to go? You may not earn a penny from the school you founded, and your belief in your students is unquestionably justified. We cannot predict what will happen to any child based on where they started, and the connections we make as teachers may tip the balance in their favor. I never looked at one of my students and said to myself, “You are a loser and will never amount to anything.” In my small part of their universe, I did my damnedest to give them the tools they needed to keep going. I would really find it hard to believe that anywhere near the majority of teachers are just going through the motions even now when ill-conceived, top- down, management edicts are maiming the profession.
2old2teach,
You’re right, and I apologize. I tend to see these issues through the lens of the community that my school is in. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that both of my kids are in an excellent District school. I think the vast majority of teachers are hard working, dedicated people.
You mention charters as “turning education over to the private sector”. I suppose it works that way in some places, but my experience is that charter schools are for the most part run by very dedicated professionals as well. The aim of most charters is to cut out the most dysfunctional parts of public education by exchanging responsibility for autonomy. Every decision in my school (within the framework of laws regarding safety, privacy, curriculum, and assessment) gets made within my school and in the best interests of our students.
It won’t sit well with most readers here, but I started a charter school precisely because I believe in public education and the promise it can offer students to do better than their parent(s), and by that I mean to have more choices in life.
jpr,
Follow that drop out’s life back to birth. What was the cause of that child dropping out of high school later. Was it the school? Was it the teachers? Was it poverty? Was it those 40 to 50 teachers that child had from kindergarten to when they dropped out.
Teachers can only teach. They can’t do the learning for a child who lives in a dysfunctional home and environment. To learn, the child has to read, work, pay attention, ask questions, cooperate.
The same teachers teach kids who go on to attend universities but they also teach kids who drop out.
When a school and its teachers are judged by student test scores, let’s move all those students to a school where all the kids are doing great and then see what happens.
A school is only as good as the students who attend it. The teachers can be great, average or burned out, but kids who want to learn do learn.
The Coleman Report and a host of other studies since 1966 all prove that teachers are only responsible for 9 to 33% of a child’s education. The rest is from factors outsider of the school environment. There have been no reputable studies since 1966 to prove that Coleman was wrong.
But if a child has 40 to 50 teachers and those teachers are responsible for a third of a child’s education, how much is one teacher responsible for? The answer is less than 1% for each teacher but the home/community environment and the parents.guardians and the child’s attitude equals more than 60%.
But those standardized test scores pushed by the fake ed reformers hold teachers responsible and accountable for the entire 100%.
Lloyd,
Once again, I hear someone arguing that teachers don’t matter, or matter so little as to be inconsequential. If you believe that, then all is lost.
And holding teachers accountable for students scores is a straw man. Holding them accountable for growth vs. expected performance is very different then absolute measures.
jpr.
“Holding them accountable for growth vs. expected performance is very different then absolute measures.”
Do teachers count, yes.
But parents count more and without parental support and a stable home/community environment and lifestyle, teachers can’t be held accountable for a student’s “expected” performance when they aren’t performing.
Passing laws at the federal level that set expected academic performance goals at 100% college readiness by age 17/18 and firing teachers/closing schools that don’t meet that goal is unrealistic and totally wrong.
No country on earth has ever achieved that goal in history. For instance, in China, about 10% of children are considered ready for college by the time they finish k – 12. Even in Singapore, every child doesn’t go to college or is college ready by age 17/18. That includes Finland where only 66.2% of students graduate from the secondary schools—the PISA test results don’t reveal that fact. In addition, in Finland only 54% of those who graduate from high school go on to graduate from college. Forty-five percent go to vocational schools. And only 25% of the Finish population has a post-secondary (college) diploma—-another fact that the fake ed reformers never mention.
Therefore, let’s compare the United States with Finland to discover which country has the highest ratio of college graduates: Finland 2.5 of every 10 adults. The US ratio is 3 in every 10. Another fact we never hear from the fake ed reformers.
There is no way a teacher can be held responsible for a student’s performance or learning when the student arrives without any intention to cooperate or do the work. It is through cooperation and interaction that students learn and even then memory plays a part too and memory is out of almost everyone’s control. Memory is almost an automatic function. But maybe Bill Gates has research going on where a usb data port may be a added to each child’s skull to enhance memory retention.
All a teacher can do is teach using a variety of methods and media. That it. They can’t do the learning for the child. They can’t follow hundreds of children home to make sure they are reading and studying at home. They can’t feed those children nutrition brain food. They can’t turn off the TVs in those homes. They can’t look up the video games.
Research shows that children who take the ten weeks off during the summer lose about a third of what they learned the previous school year while kids whose parents keep them mentally and intellectually involved during the summer lose little.
Do you propose that we also hold teachers responsible for what children forget they learned during summers away from school?
A year in the life of an average child’s education is three steps forward and one step back.
I DO believe we need a Ken Robinson-style paradigm shift; we need to meet each individual child where s/he is at, help them uncover their passions and help them fulfil their potential – whatever that may be…
we need to stop this unforgivable waste of human soul and creativity, seeing children primarily as units of future economic production, as cogs in the machine that is called society… we need to ACKNOWLEDGE the TRUTH that public education was designed to cull a few elite from the herd and train them to be the technocrats of the system and that the rest of the children were only to be given the bare minimum of skills to be factory and war fodder, that they were to be moulded into shapes that could be controlled, that fit the needs of society (which needs were determined by the ruling class)….
Seriously – tho people dont want to see it, it hasn’t really changed much in the past 150yrs…
I mean – what is STILL touted – by reformers AND most of society alike – as the main reason to get a good education, to go to college? TO GET A GOOD JOB…. and what does school and college do? TRAIN children so that they will be ’employable’…
I DO believe we need a Ken Robinson-style paradigm shift
You and me and psmirn, above, and many, many others here on these pages.
It is refreshing, Sahila, to read your posts. You seem to have courage. So many seem so afraid, so very, very careful, as if the worst that can happen to them were not failure to make something extraordinary of this wild and precious life.
I agree with most of what you said regarding how education has to change. But the goal of getting a good job is not a bad one. A good job gives you choices in life and flexibility to pursue your interests, support your family, etc.
Leaving school without being prepared for a job might work for upper class people who have connections for future employment after seeing the world or dabbling in something else, but it is not the model for a fulfilling life for low SES students.
Too many college graduates have faced the reality that education is not a guaranteed ticket to the middle class:
“The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs (in 2 Graphs)”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-growth-of-college-grads-in-dead-end-jobs-in-2-graphs/283137/
The focus on education by politicians and their billionaire sponsors is a ploy to circumvent addressing poverty, the paucity of jobs with livable wages and the inequitable distribution of wealth.
The book “Who Stole the American Dream” chronicles the broader picture of all this, starting with the Powell Memo.
The shift of money from the middle class upward has been systemic, calculated, and pervasive.
This is the context for the assaults on education we cannot ignore, and the whole thing is broader than education itself.
Crank up the rationalizations for poor performance. I guess of all I’ve heard, this one takes the cake. No need for educational achievement because you won’t get a job anyway.
“Too many college graduates have faced the reality that education is not a guaranteed ticket to the middle class:
“The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs (in 2 Graphs)”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-growth-of-college-grads-in-dead-end-jobs-in-2-graphs/283137/”
jpr, I think this is an article you need to read.
I read it when Cosmic Tinker posted it. And it is certainly true that “too many college graduates have faced the reality that education is not a guaranteed ticket to the middle class”. But it is also true that dropping out of high school is pretty much a guaranteed ticket to stay poor (a few exceptions don’t make this untrue).
We should aspire to help each student achieve what they are capable of. That certainly won’t be college for all of them, but I believe that should have to do with capability, not race or economic status. What’s most important to me is giving them the opportunity and choice.
I have a K-8 school nearby with a zero % passing rate in 8th grade. Test scores aren’t everything, but they are certainly an indication of a problem. Was nobody in that school capable of passing? Or could it be that something about that school needs to change?
I also see a large percentage of the same kids doing much better in nearby charter schools, where they respond to higher expectations for behavior and academics and benefit from the longer school day and year. Dismissing that with terms like “privatization” reinforces the public’s perception of an institution not willing to change.
I agree with most of what you have to say, and, on a very local level, your school may be addressing a legitimate need in the best way possible at this time. There are many families in Chicago that would heartily disagree that closing their neighborhood schools and replacing them with charters benefited their children. In fact, at last report CPS has not found a significant number of students who never enrolled in their designated receiving school. Apparently, their families could not handle the disruption. My point is that every location with a concentration of charters has its own story to tell. Ohio’s seems to be pretty appalling. At latest report, Chicago’s charters are not doing any better overall than public schools. We have all heard the success story in Detroit. Florida? Can you perhaps understand why people have an negative view of charters? Does every post of frustration have to have a disclaimer absolving the well run, democratically managed charters from fault?
2old2teach,
I certainly acknowledge that there are a lot of bad charter schools out there. They are not doing anyone any good, least of all other charters.
I don’t expect that every post have a disclaimer about that, but most people who post on this blog don’t recognize the such a thing as a “good” charter school. They view all charter schools as part of a corporate conspiracy to privatize education, thereby dismissing the parents who choose them as misguided, and the teachers who work in them as dupes.
I am a believer in as much power as possible being held within the school and it’s staff so that decisions can be made in the best interests of children. I believe the charter model, with its accountability to parents and state authorizers, is closer to that than the current District model. It’s far from perfect, and the implementation varies widely by state and authorizer, but to dismiss charters completely is to dismiss a lot of very dedicated people and positive accomplishments.
“…to dismiss charters completely is to dismiss a lot of very dedicated people and positive accomplishments.”
Agreed. The model of a charter that you describe is in line with the original ideas surrounding the concept. Go for it, but let us agree that neither public schools nor charters deserve all of their bad press. At this point in time, from my perspective, charters in general, no matter what their track record, are the fair-haired children of the “reform” movement. ( What a poor analogy given that black and brown minority communities are the likely recipients of charter schools.)
2old2teach,
Agreed on both counts.
jpr, absolutely right. When people label all charters collectively,nits the same false logic as label all schools as “failing”.
I wish districts met he needs of all schools. But many don’t and create the desire for alternatives.
But these are public funds, and no charters should get free passes. I’m talking to you, Eva.
Get a clue. South Korea and China have a glut of people with college degrees and not enough decent paying jobs for them, too:
This kind of insensitivity to the plight of the working poor, including those with college degrees who are burdened by student loan debt, is endemic to the ruling class in this country and exactly why we must resist you and your ilk at every turn.
werebat73 & 2 old2teach,
Regarding costs and percentages of ELL, SE, and ED students…
As a general rule, charters have lower numbers of ELL and SE students, but higher numbers of Economically Disadvantaged students. I know a lot of people ascribe this to selectivity, but I believe most of it is self-selection. Regardless of the reason, you are right to question the relative costs per student.
One you didn’t mention is the age of the students as well. In NY, charters serving elementary students and charters serving high school students get the same amount. Obviously they do not cost the same.
So, any discussion that talks in detail about costs has to include accounting for these differences. My opinion is that the cost of ELL and SE students outweighs the cost of low ED students, but not by some huge amount given the differences in percentages. I’m sure it’s different by district, but it is, for the most part, quantifiable, so I think anyone who states it as fact (as opposed to speculating that it might be true) should provide numbers.
Also, regarding “cost effectiveness”, keep in mind that charters typically have longer school days and longer school years, so they are providing a lot of what makes ELL and SE students more expensive to all students.
In NY, charters pay all costs except (partial) transportation, nursing, and books. The amount of services per student is estimated by the charter schools at around $300. The District has not disclosed how much they are spending on it.
SE money follows the student and IEPs are owned by the district, so in many cases, SE money goes right back to the district to provide the services. In a lot of cases, the remediation that we do with SE students is outside their IEP, so we provide that without additional reimbursement and still give them their IEP-required services as well via district providers for a net zero cost. We are prohibited by law (for who knows what reason) from contracting for SE services from other charters or from BOCES, who provides many of these services to districts.
The main reason that charters get less in NY is that we don’t get any building money nor buildings (caveat is NYC schools, which sometimes get buildings and most of whom will start getting building money next year). Our reimbursement rate is set based on the operational budget of our host districts, and does not include the capital expenditures. Hopefully, that will change over time so that charter students receive equitable funding.
jpr, I think you’re right about special needs kids self-selecting away from charters, and it’s something the critics don’t allow for. At least in my state, SC, traditional schools typically have well-established programs, often because they are larger. Often parents of SE kids are more careful about services for their children, having been more involved.
The great paradox is that SC is establishing tax-credit based “scholarships” for SE kids to attend private schools, yet most private schools have less than adequate programs. And in other states with similar programs,the kids getting the help are already in private schools.
I really think the outrage comes when people like Eva displace students with special needs with really no thought for their rights and are helped by the government to do it. Since charters as a whole do not outperform public schools, what is the rationale for encouraging an almost unfettered expansion?
2old2teach,
Certainly, the concept of a charter school kicking out special needs kids sounds terrible. But, I think there’s probably more to it than that.
First of all, please permit me to point out that you refer to “Eva” displacing those students as opposed to Eva’s students displacing them, which tends to put a spin on the discussion right out of the gate, though I’m sure not intentional.
I’m sure resource decisions regarding public space in NYC are always contentious since it’s very expensive to rent. But, Eva would have no income (or job) without parents choosing her schools, so that has to be considered. Her students are primarily from economically disadvantaged families, and the parents obviously want her school to expand or they couldn’t.
I don’t know the details, but I could see an objective decision for the prior administration regarding allowing an expanding school to be in a single building and having to move a smaller group of students into another space as a result. It’s hard not to look at the decisions of the new administration through a political lens, though I hope they made their initial decision objectively despite some signs to the contrary. Hopefully all of the students end up in public space where they belong.
Also, re charter performance in NYC, I think the data is pretty convincing that they are a benefit: http://www.nyccharterschools.org/resources/credo-study-charter-school-performance-new-york-city-2013. CREDO is the source of the 2009 nationwide charter study that Diane and other charter critics cite most frequently. Diane and others are critical of CREDO now that their findings on NYC schools are positive, but the methodology is the same, see http://www.redefinedonline.org/2013/08/nepc-takes-a-u-turn-on-charter-school-study/.
JPR, to begin with, Eva’s Success Academy does not have the children with high special- needs in her schools. As is well documented, the neighborhood public schools have 14.1% students in self-contained classrooms because of severe special needs. She has zero.
JPR, her plan is to kick out the kids with special needs to make more room for her school. The legislature has now given her permission to take over the entire school and kick out all the kids. Why are her students more deserving than other students? She has many billionaires on her 22 boards. Why don’t they pay rent? Why do they insist on free space when they are not a public school subject to the same laws?
As for charter performance, the state results were startlingly clear in 2013. The charters got exactly the same scores as the public schools, despite the many advantages of extra resources, fewer high-needs students–of the charters.
A big of advice: saying the same wrong thing over and over doesn’t make it true.
Diane,
I understand that you don’t think charter schools are public schools, but I, and many other people do.
So, humor me for a sec on that one supposition. If true, it makes no more sense for you to ask a supporter of a charter to pay their rent than it would for me to ask you to pay the rent for a public school you support.
I’m not defending Eva’s school. I don’t know enough about it. But my point was that resource discussions happen all of the time. If the NYC Chancellor decided to move those students to a different school in order to make room for a expanding District school, would there be the same uproar?
I don’t agree with what I think the legislature’s decision says. I’m just saying that things are rarely as black and white as so many make them out to be.
Charter school performance has increased every year in NY relative to District schools. Charters still outperform comparable neighborhood schools. IMO, last year’s results showed a legitimate issue; that many charters were getting gains with low income students that just go them to passing. When the bar was raised, those students ended up under that bar.
I know my school, and I assume all other charters, have heeded that as a wake up call that our instruction has to get more rigorous, and in depth, and that we have to do as well at enrichment as we do at remediation. This has resulted in a lot of hiring of academic coaches and expansion of continuous professional development programs for teachers, which are great things. Based on the trends, I have no doubt that we will achieve that.
Frankly, one challenge for my school is that upstate schools still don’t get building funds, so the community is spending thousands of dollars less for each of our students than they spend on those in the district schools. We have to pay building expenses out of operating expenses, which takes away from our ability to hire those additional academic positions. The lack of building funds for charter schools means bigger class sizes and fewer professional staff. It’s disappointing to see a lot of educators cheering that because they don’t view charter kids as public school kids.
That one glaring difference in opinion makes it impossible to have some conversations. You want us to say that comparing charters and public schools should be done on an apples to apples basis. One of the basic contentions about charters here is that because charters do not operate under the same rules as public schools they are not public schools. You can disagree, but you cannot expect those of us who disagree to argue under your conditions. I find it ludicrous to expect that I can go and open a school outside the governance of the local district and then expect the public school system to pay for it! When a mechanism is created within the public schools to create and control charter schools, then we can have a discussion about what the public schools refuse to provide for you.
2old2teach,
“You want us to say that comparing charters and public schools should be done on an apples to apples basis.”
I’ve never said that. I don’t even think one can compare among different charter schools or district schools that way.
Charters frequently have lower SE and lower ELL populations, but higher low SES and minority populations.
Some charters operate with substantially less money than District schools, and some operate with more. Some get building expenses paid, and some don’t.
As for “opening a school outside the governance of the local district”, if you believe, as I do, that the local districts are frequently a source of the problem, or at least are unable to do anything substantial about it, you look for alternatives. Charter spending levels are effectively set by the local district (based on their own spending), so taxpayers are represented in that way. For that matter, most school board elections and budget votes have very small participation, and many have disproportionate representation from various groups (for example, racial minority and low SES participation in school board elections and budget votes is frequently very low). School budgets are often extremely vague, and voters are only given the opportunity for an up or down vote; they don’t get to express an opinion.
Sometimes board candidates represent different opinions, but many times they are indistinguishable. Sometimes, a dissident member or two is powerless. As an example, in my city, one board member asked for a report from the administration on how many children were retained from 3rd grade and what their NYS test scores and grades were. The next thing in the minutes? “Failing a majority of board members wanting to see this information, the information will not be provided”.
Charters get no money unless parents enroll their children there, so the community is represented in that way. I think “voting” by entrusting your children to a school is more powerful than the concept of the neighborhood school that is entitled to your children because it’s the only option.
I know there are few fans of parental choice here on this blog, but I hope everyone at least thinks about the parental choice that many people make by moving to what they consider to be a more desirable school district. IMO, it should not be right for that kind of choice to be OK, while parental choice in an urban school district is not. Again, IMO, that leads to greater wealth and income disparity, which I believe is the absolute worst thing happening to this country right now.
In some ways, and I’ll try to word this carefully, I feel about school choice the same way I feel about flag burning. People who want a flag burning amendment are so attached to the *symbol* of democracy that they lose sight of the fact that banning flag burning attacks the actual underlying democratic principal. In this case, I think protecting district schools that are not performing well and denying low income parents a choice of schools is protecting an idealized notion of something while actually denying something real to actual children.
It’s complicated, and I’m not expecting to convert anyone to my point of view, but that’s why I have it. Also, I understand why anyone who thinks that all schools are doing the best they can with the population they serve and the resources they have wouldn’t think this was important. I just don’t think it’s at all realistic to believe that is true, and I’ve seen a lot of evidence that it is not. It would be like saying you have to go to the doctor that’s nearest to your house regardless of who they are (oh, unless you have money, in which case you can go see whomever you please). That doesn’t seem fair, and I don’t see any incentive whatsoever for that local doctor to offer great service, seek continuous improvement, etc. since patients have to come there anyway.
In NY, any district can create their own charter schools, but none have except for NYC. They have the mechanism, but they choose not to. As I’ve mentioned before, if I saw a way to get higher expectations for behavior and academics for low SES students, a longer school day and year, etc., through the district that my school is in, I would have worked that route. I am still trying to make that happen, but school districts are institutions that are not structured for change.
There is too much to comment on here. We are way far apart. When you have clear and compelling evidence that you have discovered the secret sauce, bring it back to us. That was the original mission of charters–to incubate innovative and creative models that can be brought to scale in the public schools.
Let’s not play word games here. Eva’s actions are responsible for the displacement of disabled students who have a space that was dedicated to their needs. A review of the analysis available points clearly to political power being brought to bear. In a sense you are right since I doubt Eva thought twice about how her actions affected these high needs students. To her their needs were unimportant; she was just advocating for a space she wanted for her school. Why the sudden reversal in your stated disapproval of tactics of Eva?
2oldtoteach,
No reversal of opinion. I think the main issue is that people who don’t consider charter schools public would certainly think collocations to me no sense. I get that.
But, i consider these kids to be public school kids, and therefore due *equal* access to public space. It sounds to me like the law goes past that, and I don’t support any special treatment for charters.
I do think that people have a mental image of Eva using the space for some evil, corporate purpose, but these are equally valuable children, teachers, and parents. Not *more* valuable! but surely *as* valuable.
So, when people talk about evicting charters, I feel they are not thinking about the students, or teachers, but about something else;most likely some notion of the profit-making charter, which IMO doesn’t exist, at least in NY.
My only point was that I hope resource decisions are made with the aim of providing the greatest good/least harm to all students involved, but I fear that neither side may be doing that.
Don’t forget Eva’s almost $500,000 annual pay. The more Charter schools that she runs, the higher that pay will climb. The evidence says she’s more than willing to run over anyone that gets in her way.
@bitchencamero,
I didn’t mention the time or money that I put into my school until you called me a “robber baron”. I didn’t mention our incoming class’s test scores until you said that my school cherry picked students.
You say “when it comes to the health and welfare of children there is no compromise”, yet you expect me and the parents at my school to compromise with their children? They already get substantially less money for their children’s education, but you would like to take away their school as well?
You find it very easy to attack me, or at least the straw man you’ve constructed in my place. I’m curious what you would say to them. What’s your message to my parents?
District13parent,
If you keep telling the truth, if you have no profit motive, if your only goal is the best interest of children and our society, then I believe our message will get through.
I hope so. I have no motive except having seen my family benefit from the absolute best of what the public schools have to offer, here in New York City, even in the face of massive budget cuts and insane testing. Meanwhile, I have seen the achievement gap of race and class play out in those same classrooms for a decade and more. And I see how the deformers prey so skillfully on the parents coming up, who have no clue of what has come before but only want what is best for their own child. At least in our part of the world, the message of choice is often, too, a coded racial message. So no, no profit motive, only a wish to see the public schools here in our small part of Brooklyn become the true centers of community that I would wish them to be. At least where we live, the introduction of choice schools is rapidly desegregating the public schools by both class and race.
Agreed, the “weaker defense position of responding”, doesn’t work.
Democrats like Harry Reid are successfully destroying the impact of Koch money. We can make the Koch’s, the face of education deform, because of their connection to ALEC. Being a fast second, in joining an existing offensive campaign, has a greater likelihood of getting a broad message out to citizens.
The new brand identity for democracy, including public education, can be incorporated into a highly visible, anti-Koch message.
“Self-serving Koch Bros. threaten our communities, with Gates in the wings…”
My humble opinion.
Precisely!
The Koch brothers have put a lot of money into funding the opposition from the right to the Common Core. In this, they are true to their Libertarian principles. They don’t like the idea of creating a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
The Koch brothers may not support Common Core but they do support the private sector Charter school movement and both will achieve the same goal—an end to public education.
With the Koch brothers, it’s a mixed bag and I think they are confused. They don’t support the public schools, teachers or teacher unions and they don’t like Common Core because that will put control of education in the hands of the federal government instead of the states.
Their supporters on the right are not happy about the Koch brothers’ opposition to the Common Core. I say, give me that opposition from any place on the political spectrum. When George Bush, Sr. first floated the idea of a national standards and national tests, he was immediately hooted down by folks left, right, and center. How far we have fallen from those days!
Nah. Silly. Democrats like Harry Reid are destroying his party’s once reputation for truth and probity. Being anti Koch alone and pro Reid illustrates the difficulty with the messages emanating from this blog: they do not truly understand the people.
The irony is that the Resistance is a tyranny protesting against another tyranny (reform).
This blog’s main thrust CANNOT withstand disclosure of its positive program because that positive program is not positive.
It will require an entire “spiritual” and political conversion of the public school teaching and administration cadres to sympathy with the tea party ethos.
I have been converted by reading this blog to support for public education as a concept, but I have also concluded that its present regime is incapable of reform (and not the fake reform of the Duncans, Bushes and Rhees), and thus expect charters and vouchers to continue to make creeping progress until public education is effectively destroyed.
When the states stop taking federal money, I’ll believe in their having a new understanding of constitutional government.
To put it as hyperbolically as possible, you have the communists (public school teachers) opposing the nazis (Obama, Duncan, et al).
What’s to choose?
I like what Bob Shepherd wrote in response to the question: what’s the alternative:
“So, what’s the alternative? (Ed Deformers always ask this, expecting stunned silence in reply. Well, here’s the alternative.)
An open-source wiki to which are published, for every domain, in every subject, for varied learners, at every grade level, VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, ALTERNATIVE
standards
frameworks
sample lesson plans
model curricula
learning progressions (aka curriculum maps)
pedagogical techniques, strategies, and rationales
model assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performance)
texts
in a variety of formats (including video)
prepared by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, practitioners (teachers, curriculum coordinators, other administrators), and professionals in various fields
That’s how you get innovation.”
This describes an organizational structure based on networks instead of hierarchies. The “reform movement” reinforces the hierarchical factory model that has been in place since the 1920s, a model that has been replaced in virtually every organization except public education. Readers of this blog seem to be FOR equitably funded democratically governed schools that provide every student with a truly equal opportunity for success. Maybe we should call ourselves The Equalizers. Make the Tea Party and Limbaugh/Fox ditto heads argue against an equal opportunity for every kid in America and force the “reformers” to explain how their selective charter schools can ever attain this outcome.
Thank you. Yes. A networked, open-source model as opposed to an early-twentieth-century factory model.
But the Common Core is all about Command and Control.
The Deformers can’t decide whether we are all Tea Partiers or Commies. LOL. They would go NUTS hearing “equalizers” from us.
Their worst nightmare. Room 101 for Ed Deformers. In that room is Equity.
The thing I hate most about charter schools is that every day, they lie. I’ve seen it. For instance, they rent busses, take kids out of a school on lobbying field trips, tell the kids and parents that it’s necessary for their education – it’s not.
All-or-nothing choices, slogan chanting, us vs. them – this is what we see the charter profiteers putting our kids through. If your family’s getting richer as a result? Maybe not so painful. For those of us who empathize with the kids and families needlessly dragged through the political wringer that the charter schools are creating, it’s very painful.
So, totalitarian techniques with an underlying motive of really big PROFIT for the profiteers. Does it matter if there are a few “good” charter schools? Not to me.
I really wish you were wrong, Diane. I wish we were engaged in a healthy, democratic debate over educational methods and policies. I wish proponents of high-stakes testing and a national curriculum (CCSS), however misguided those radical innovations of our day, were just interested in helping kids learn better.
But the question is much deeper than that. As you have pointed out so often — and as our political and economic leaders refuse to acknowledge — free, democratically governed public schools are the bedrock of a free, democratic society. Their very existence is threatened by this wave of radical disruptions of our schools, the worst of which in my state of New York has been the successful effort to replace the rightful authority of teachers and parents over our children’s classrooms with long-distance control through the tests and test-prep products of the Pearson Corporation.
We must resist. We must reject national standards in favor of our gloriously pluralistic, democratic education system — and we must eliminate the practice of evaluating students and teachers with intrinsically mediocre and uninformative mass-produced tests.
Fellow members of the Resistance — refuse the tests, and restore control of our schools to the people actually raising the next generation of Americans — parents and teachers!
well said
Amen!
CCSS/PARCC/SBAC/APPR/VAM were IMPOSED on us by non-educators. They refused to allow us a seat at the table.They used a top-down, command-and-control management style in order to demean through implied mistrust and demoralize by making us feel powerless.
This is an outright invasion of the public school system by outside forces using nefarious means. It is a reform movement built on threats, coercion, punishment, and secrecy.
This is NOT an educational debate or discussion.
This is a political battle and we should show them no mercy for we will receive none in return.
To remain compliant and complacent is exactly what they expect.
The Resistance works for me, because thats what it will take to win out.
Using this terms begs the question, “What are you resisting?”
Which is exactly what we want to be asked.
Diane, your movement, your call.
I like the terms “freedom rider” or “freedom fighter”
yes yes yes
Yes, we are the resistance trying to take back our country from the fascists who now control it. And they are fascists and an argument may be made that links them—with evidence—to fascist political philosophies that may be traced back to the Nazis. That doesn’t mean today’s American fascists are the same as Hitler’s regime because over time, the philosophies that rule them have evolved and changed but they are still fascist.
Not a good label. We need to relabel the “reformers” as “corporatist” or “deformers,” since they are deforming public education. Otherwise, we lose the diction war. “Resistance” is dicey, because it carries baggage that is both positive and negative. We need to find a term that can only be interpreted as positive.
They are the Masters, the Teachers are the Field Bosses, and the Children are the Slaves.
You cannot have a Master without a Slave.
Until there can be a better plan, the parents must not allow their child to be a slave to this oppressive environment that will actually condition them to become a slave.
Texas Parents Opt Out
“They are the Masters, the Teachers are the Field Bosses, and the Children are the Slaves.”
I want to rephrase that: “They are the generals, the teachers are the troops, and the children are the targets.”
What happens to the troops when they don’t do what the generals order them to do?
The answer to that question is how the military works and that is the method being used to force Common Core standardized testing on the country.
I agree! Abu Ghraib
How about:
THEY are the PERPETRATORS (Perpetrating abuse to children)
WE are the CHILD ADVOCATES (Protecting children from child abuse)
How about “Real Reformers?” This is a term that has been used by many opponents of privatization here in NYC.
I think that most of us who defend public education would also agree that it is in need of reform. Deceptions of the so-called reformers aside, there’s no question the NYC public schools have long been in need of reform, whether in regard to funding, staffing, assessments, management, etc. That’s one reason why the privateers have been so successful, because they have manipulated and played upon the public’s sense that schools are in need of change. Of course, what they call reform is really a hostile takeover and privatization. That doesn’t mean we deny the need for change, but that we refuse to allow the privateers to hijack it,and that we, the real reformers, lead the public schools to a renaissance.
Perfectly stated, on all counts, Michael.
This I can agree with, Michael. As long as that idea of reform does not mean imposition of some ONE WAY for all, which I know you would not want.
Absolutely. In my mind, that’s a given, but I should have explicitly said so.
As a lifelong public school advocate and retired NYC public school teacher, I strongly agree that “we ,the real reformers, lead the public schools to a renaissance.”
The Renaissance
I like that. The humane alternative to the imposition of a technocratic Philistinism
Diane,
you have already coined it…THE NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION
Good point.
As an analog, in the early days of The Congress for the New Urbanism, only those professionals, and a handful of politicians and media, were at all interested in the organization’s ideas and work. Today, you can’t talk to a politician or municipal planning department staffer without the conversation being peppered with the nomenclature CNU defined and disseminated, which was completely foreign to them before CNU was founded.
Granted, that evolution took a very long time; something we do not have. But focusing attention on NPE, and giving the organization increasing visibility and relevance in the ongoing battle for public education, is far preferable IMO to potentially dissipating energy by rallying under the slogan of “the Resistance.”
It also avoids, for the time being, this potentially divisive debate over whether reform is needed or not. However, that discussion needs to be continued and a resolution reached.
As a name, if not, Network for Public Education, “United Front for the Ravitch Plan”
I agree that The Network for Public Education is the right name and right organization for what we are doing to resist the prevailing educational ideology that seeks to impose corporate mindsets on education, which is not a corporate enterprise but a public right. At AERA this weekend Ken Zeichner said that the dominant idea right now is you either support the status quo or you want to blow it all up, and he asked, “What about transformation?” I think that is an interesting word choice that might capture the nuance we seek, and also something of the notion of local control over how the transformation occurs.
It’s too bad that Evolution has a bad rap among so many Americans, for the term captures what happens in an ecological system that is not centrally planned.
I love the connotations of The Resistance. The historical resonances are powerful. The moment people start talking about Reform, these days, bells go off for me, for what I immediately suspect is another would-be cult leader with The Plan for all.
We need an ecology, not a monoculture. We need a networked, open-source model, not centralized command and control. We need Wikipedia, not Encarta. We need freedom, not tyranny. We need intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic punishment and reward, for the later is DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks, like teaching and learning.
And we need well-funded, free, independent, autonomous, teacher-led PUBLIC schools and high-quality wrap-around services, from Day 1 of each child’s life, in our poorest communities. The federal role should be a redistributive one and, of course, to ensure that free, nondiscriminatory education is available to all. But the moment some federal official starts talking centralized regimentation, standardization, command, and control, he or she should be tarred and feathered.
“We need a networked, open-source model, not centralized command and control. ”
Like others have said: NPE.
Wonderfully said. Keep up the good fight.
The Network for Public Education is great, but there is no explicit or even implicit message. No overall talking point. If we were to add a sub-title/talking point then I think it would be someting we could maybe agree on.
The NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION:
Fighting the Corporate Reform Movement
or
The NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION:
Defending America’s Schools
or
The NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION:
Standing Against Corporate Takeover
or
The NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION:
Righting the Wrongs of Punitive Reform
or
The NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION:
Resisting Test-Based Reform
Of course one could mix and match
“Standing Against Test-Based Reform”
“Fighting Punitive School Reform”
Vive la résistance!!!
Join the Resistance, become a member of the Ravitch Underground
I like this. It resonates.
Plutôt mourir debout que vivre à genoux
I do not doubt YOU and others here will “resist” as there was a resistance during WWII in Norway and France, but I am not sanguine about the general ability of the public school community to resist the CCSS. Rather I think we will see the Quisling government and the Vichy government. Nevertheless, keep up the fight. When the Obama administration threatens you resisting teachers with rejection of your health care applications for coverage under the UnAffordable UnCaring Act because you are no longer toeing the party line, you will have a real chance to prove your courage, but in the meantime I don’t expect public school teachers in general raise an audible peep about the testing or anything else. They will be, as we used to say, be “co-opted” by “the man.” The main burden of education has always been carried by the public school systems in this country and probably it should be, BUT how it can be without greater and faster economic growth (which teachers generally vote against) escapes me.
When do teachers, or anyone, except conservatives vote “against economic growth.” LOL!
It’s you conservatives, who don’t understand basic macroeconomics, that impede economic growth. There is a ton of work that needs to be done in our country. And much of it can only be done by the public sector. But conservatives with their truly moronic hatred of anything “public” or “government” or “union” would rather watch the country stay stuck in the ditch than hire public sector workers at anything near the rate of current need and demand.
In fact, it was public sector jobs, at all levels and sectors of government that helped the Reagan Administration get employment down to a low level while keeping a low rate of inflation.
But, you see, in those days the right-wing, bad as they were, had some realists among them. They’ve all been driven off of the ranch by the true nut bags, the tea baggers, the numbskulls and the imbeciles who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand, Libertarianism and I JUST THINK THIS GOVERNMENT IS ALREADY SPENDING WAY TOO MUCH AND 99% OF IT IS A BIT BUNCH OF WASTE!
(And then, very often, this same old white guy, gets off the blog, finishes his cup of coffee and says, “Hey honey, I’ve gotta drop off my Social Security check at the bank and then get over to that new clinic for my checkup and x-rays. Thank goodness for Medicare! I just hope that the government stays away from Medicare and Social Security from now on!”
Boy, did you hit that nail on the head. I have a former friend (I’ve known him for almost sixty years)—one of those out of touch, far right, totally brainwashed conservative nutcases you mention in your comment—who bad mouths Social Security, Medicare and/or the VA where he has his medical coverage, but he still cashes that Social Security check every month and uses the VA medical for his health care, while bad mouthing them every step of the way.
When I challenged him to put his actions where his mouth is and stop cashing his SS check and drop out of VA medical, he replied that he’d earned that Social Scrutiny check and the VA medical for his service in Vietnam as if no one else had. It seems that he and the other nut cases that think like him believe that most of the people who collect SS and use Medicare didn’t earn those programs but are welfare queens and kings.
In fact, the SS site posts the data that shows the vast majority or recipients worked most of their lives and paid into SS and Medicare for decades. The number of widows and disabled who collect SSD and/or are on medicare, are insignificant fraction compared to the total number who actually worked until they were to old or sick to work any longer.
Contrary to popular conservative opinions, the US has never been a welfare state. The number of people who live or lived off any form of welfare has always very small compared to those who got up and went to work everyday. And that information and history is all available on-line through the Census and other government agencies who track that data.
In addition, the number of workers who work for the federal government has seldom if ever been more than 1% of the total population (not counting the military) and the private sector workforce numbers well above one hundred million adults—many who work in sectors that require no college education.
These brainwashed far-right conservatives are either too lazy or too stupid to fact check their opinions because if they did, they wouldn’t have much to stand on for what they believe. The facts from primary sources (the IRS, the Census and other fact gathering government agencies—the only fact gathering sources that gather all the facts and not just a sample survey) would prove them wrong almost every time.
“The number of widows and disabled who collect SSD and/or are on medicare, are insignificant fraction compared to the total number who actually worked until they were to old or sick to work any longer.”
I think perhaps this statement carries some unintended judgements? Those damned widows! All they ever did was raise the kids, keep house, and work at Walmart’s for pin money. And the disabled? Give me a break! Go sit on the corner with a cup and some pencils!
I understand what you mean. There are heartless individuals in the US who don’t care if people rot or starve if they don’t have to pay for it or see it. And they don’t want to know the reasons or history of these people.
To the heartless, it doesn’t matter to them that the widow had a husband who worked for forty-five years and left her his SS when he died for the few remaining years of her life, or that a disabled woman or man may have worked for decades and then for whatever reason—a job accident or an accident on the road on the way to eat out—left them disabled and unable to work.
My older brother ended on SSD. He started working at age 17 and worked until he was 60 when, due to damaged feet and knees from all those years working hard labor on his feet, he couldn’t work anymore and was put on SSD. He often bragged that he never applied for food stamps or welfare in his life. That he always managed to find work, always hard physical manual labor, that paid enough to barely survive.
He died at 64, a year away form getting off SSD and moving over to SS. But he worked for 43 years and the hard labor ruined his health—that and the heavy drinking and cigarettes.
I had not heard that public sector jobs created the Reagan boom. In fact, I don’t believe it. You may, of course, be right, and I may be wrong. If you have a link to a definitive article, I’d appreciate it.
I am an 88 year-old product of public education, and I believe it has no peer. I have lived in communities with private schools and charter schools, and they are found wanting in many respects. Were there an absence of concerted opposition to them now, I believe they would be faring well, but needed funding is being siphoned off to the charters and private educational entities, with the result of a lack of necessary materials and both financial and community support to be successful.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing recently, that we are the Resistance standing up to the Status Quo, as well as against the ESTABLISHMENT that’s responsible for constructing, maintaining and expanding it…
Wonderful!
If our teachers are so terrible, maybe we should sue the institutions of learning that prepared us for teaching. Better yet, our K-12 schools didn’t do their jobs. When does the blaming game end? Enough of the scapegoating. My advice to teachers…know your students. Learn what motivates them to want to learn. Listen to your students. They are so much more than a random number. The best revenge against those who believe they know what’s best is to ignore them and focus on your students. If you want to label me as a failure, go ahead. My next move will be to sue those who failed me. How ridiculous is that notion? Yes, education has always been a hotbed for debate and blame. Stop blaming and start listening to what your students need, and if all they need is some encouraging words, then give them words that will give them courage. I say we call ourselves not resistors, but peacekeepers. Our children need to know that we are there to guide them to their potential. Let’s all be the gatekeepers and the peacemakers in this debate over education.
This is very, very beautiful, begtodiffer!
But let’s not be peacemakers with those who would abuse children. The Ed Deform machine is an instrument of abuse. Teachers need to take back their profession. It is that, in your comment, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Thank you Bob, and although I would like to do what I can to keep the peace, I also know it is impossible to do so.
Know your adversaries. Neville Chamberlain wanted to be a peacekeeper and all that got him was a worthless piece of paper from Hitler, which led him to falsely claim he had achieved “peace in our time.”
Please try to refrain from romanticizing oppression. We cannot win battles against an aggressive ruling class comprised of billionaires and their purchased political lackeys through appeasement or by letting them walk all over us,
This is the new Gilded Age and wealthy non-educators have claimed ownership of our domain because they’ve found it to be profitable. We must rise up and resist their dominance and oppression on every front!
Well said!
I beg to differ, begtodiffer.
This is NO debate.
We have NO seat at the table.
There is NO discussion.
The corporate reformers want NO part of us.
This is a POLITICAL BATTLE, pure and simple.
We are up against a ruthless and powerful foe.
They are literally banking on our complacency and compliance.
This is an invasion of the public school system.
Welcome to the Resistance. Stay fierce and fearless.
THE NETWORK for PUBLIC EDUCATION
Saying NO to Punitive, Test-Based Reform
Working Together to Stop the Madness
Wonderfully said. The time to peacefully negotiate has long passed.
Did I miss the peaceful negotiation?
Apparently.
The “peaceful discussion” began in 1989, when G H Bush established the first Education Summit and invited NO educators to attend. That sin of omission has continued ever since. There’s no need to talk to peons when politicians have been able to leverage their power to manipulate educators without interference for at least 25 years.
The time for talk has long passed. Now is the time for action.
Building the Machine:
http://www.commoncoremovie.com/
Why the people who paid to build the machine did so:
Progress, against the false narrative, created and promulgated by the Koch Bros., relies on stopping their influence. The unrelenting barrage of unfounded disparagement against teachers and public education, allows opportunists like Gates and the DeVoses to prey.
And the WORST thing about the Kochs is that they make some of their money from OIL!!!!! Right, Linda?
Absolutely not, Harlan. Make no mistake, anyone that makes money from a resource that, by its nature is both A) Toxic and B) Finite is taking part in a crime against the planet’s fragile ecosystem—you know, the complex biological systems that keep ALL species alive—and humanity itself.
But the fact that the Koch’s use oil—for just some of their obscene amount of wealth is probably about 15th on a long list of reasons to oppose them.
Their funding of extremist right-wing candidates, their funding of ultra-conservative hate groups, anti-ecology groups, militant anti-gay groups and much more are all more important reasons to dislike and distrust those two economic terrorists and sociopaths.
No human being should be allowed to accumulate that much money as a personal fortune. No one should have that amount of money.
Let’s jettison the fairy tales here; most nations abolished their monarchies or stripped them of real, substantive, unchallenged power centuries ago.
People realized it was dumb—and very counterproductive—to put that much power into the hands of a few people.
Most of us have no problem with vast wealth—in the multiple millions—which would buy you and your family circle virtually anything you could ever want for generations to come.
But when you get into the hundreds of millions—and then billions, and multiple billions, then it’s not about financial security over the long term. Nor is it even about absolute luxurious living over the long term.
At that point this handful of people have enormous POLITICAL POWER. They become the New Kings and Queens that can they override the will of millions and force their personal opinions on how society should be run on the rest of us.
I think that’s wrong and I am not going to stand for any version of Neo-Royalty.
Now, perhaps you LIKE the ideas of Gates, Broad, Walton and others imposing their truly awful, retrograde, “reforms” on all of us, whether we like it or not.
However, what happens in the future, when the Rich And Entitled Kings And Queens have a change of heart, or their children do, and they’re supporting things you REALLY detest?
Give it some thought. Because as long as we have “Royalty” in ANY form, by “divine right” or by “marketplace rewards”, we might as well be living in a Medieval World with more advanced technology.
Pugent Sound Parent,
Your 4:13 post is persuasive.
It reflects an understanding that our nation faces a great evil. I have been reluctant to characterize the Koch’s in terms that were black and white. But the future of a great nation, and the world, are threatened by them so, we must act, based on reality.
Tom Brokaw described Americans of the WWII era, as the greatest generation that ever lived. If we don’t defeat the Kochs, we will be the worst generation that ever lived.
I always thought “Progressive Educator”, “Public Educator”, or just plain “Teacher” said it all.
But perhaps it’s time to revive the fine old term “Reivers” for what the corporate raiders and privateers are doing to our public schools.
And you can spell it phonetically if you like …
I agree with several others here that “Resistance” is not quite right. It sounds like we are standing our ground, but not going forward. The uninformed and indifferent (and there are many) would see us as defending the status quo. “Oh, those guys are just afraid of change.” No, we are leading a rebellion. We are Revolutionaries. If you want a more hip word, we are the Insurgent.
Insurgents. That’s good too.
The Insurgency. Nice. But will that create a Counter Insurgency?
Insurgents are communist revolutionaries, think Castro and Cuba. Is THAT the connotation you want? Granted, Baptista was corrupt, but Castro and Che were beyond corrupt and into murder of those who disagreed. Is that the implication you want, that teachers pushing back against the CCSS are against free speech because the end justifies the means? Maybe that’s what’s been troubling me about the nature of this blog for so many months, that the defense of public schools is by people who would not shrink from tyranny.
Tell me it isn’t so.
:o)
From the Urban Dictionary:
A word for rebel that the Bush Administration uses to define freedom fighters in Iraq becuase the administration thinks that it sounds more like “inserted” implying that the rebel forces are from outside Iraq and therefore less legitimate.
“Let’s not use ‘rebel,’ that will remind kids too much of Star Wars and they might start thinking that these people have a right to defend their country from foreign invaders. Use ‘insurgent,’ instead. That way it sounds like they’re terrorists rather than just people trying to defend their homes.”
– Donald Rumsfeld
Harlan, the colonial revolutionaries in 1774 were insurgents. Now go think of a better title.
Excellently written but one glaring question, what about wolves-in-sheep’s clothing such a Steve Zimmer, member of the Los Angeles Unified School District board of education who actively destroys teacher’s rights to due process yet gets print and attention from you? He talks out of one side of his mouth about strengthening teaching as a profession while firing teachers based upon false and perjured charges. Where does he fit in in this struggle? Thousands of us have lost our jobs. We’ll be watching to see how you deal with him in this forum.
Oooops, Peter. If the following are your criteria for stigmatizing the privatizers, you won’t have much credibility except with most posters on this blog:
“are backing other anti-populist interests like opposing a minimum wage increase or equal pay for women, or taking away the vote from anyone who doesn’t have the “new and improved” documentation”
Why?
1) The minimum wage increase is a “shibboleth” being used to direct attention away from the Obama administration’s failures. It’s bad economics and lying politics.
2)Same for the equal pay for women because it isn’t true.
3) by taking away the vote, you must mean trying to prevent voter fraud.
Support for public education can’t be collected by lies.
Actually, it’s support for your Tea Party that “can’t be collected by lies.”
“Facts & Figures: Women and Pay Inequality”
http://billmoyers.com/content/facts-figures-women-and-pay-inequality/
“Debunking the Myth of a Mythical Gender Pay Gap”
http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/08/debunking-the-myth-of-a-mythical-gender-pay-gap/
Harlan,
Sometimes your paranoia and obtuseness is funny. Almost quaint in its way.
But sometimes its just so ridiculous that it’s hard to even laugh at what you’re saying.
Making a shitty wage that not even a single adult, living alone, could possibly survive upon is somehow something “made up” to cover up Obama’s economic “failures”?!?!
You sound like a wacko.
And equal pay for women “isn’t true”?
You’re sounding really doltish there? Are you in some kind of time warp?
Voter Fraud? LOL! Where and when? And when did it ever change the outcome of an election—except for George W. Bush stealing the White House in 2000?
Crazy right-wing opinions aren’t taken too seriously in a room of educated people; unless they’re really pissed off old white guys. Is that you, Harlan?
AND, you’re actually delusional enough to think—like most old white guys do—that YOUR bizarro world opinions are in The Majority?!?!?
Uh, yeah….maybe they WERE, back in the early 1960s when the Bizarro World first appeared in DC Comics; but not now.
If you think people want to keep wages low, or keep women earning less than men or that the 4 guys who Fox “News” called the “New Black Panthers” could actually “steal” an election, you’re truly looking and acting more than a bit unhinged…
Vive la résistance!
Saying NO to Punitive, Test-Based Reform.
Working Together to Stop the Madness.
Leonard Cohen singing “The Partisan”
http://irc.lv/video?id=QB62FXk1z9QK
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Did someone above say “Renaissance” or did I just imagine that? I think it’s a far better subtitle for NPE than ‘resistance’.
Anyone who’s been reading this blog for six months or more will know that the topic which engages us is only partially resistance to ‘ed-deform’ (i.e., the political framing of any ed debate into union vs anti-union, blaming dismal economy on ‘failing’ public ed, while bringing onboard racist & uber-Christian voters)– & the co-opting of all the above by Friedmanites & monied interests in general). The topic which interests this blog is how to bring the best that US public ed has to offer to all students.
Welcome to those new voices chiming in on this thread, who want to re-direct us to developing a platform which is not simply anti-status quo, but which spells out what we want for the future! I have to admit to a certain recent lassitude, finding threads so often just choral repeats.
But you are mistaken if you’ve read D Ravitch only in the negative; you must have missed the last few chapters of Reign of Error. And you’re wrong if you think we regulars are simply a bunch of naysayers– without (a)specifics on how to encourage critical thinking at the ground level– and (b)against all ‘accountability’. Just read the few posts before this one.
True, ‘the joy of teaching is gone’ from Syracuse is ‘anti’– very precise in outlining the specific negative effects on daily classroom experience in early grades where CCSS-inspired literacy exercises have replaced imaginative play– [tho I would suggest an on-the-ground examination of CCSS implementation is informative]– but take a gander at ‘Hoover, Alabama: I Just Want to Teach’ for a detailed description of a collaborative set of assessments, teacher-designed and admin-supported, to see just one of the myriad methods espoused by the teachers who input this blog which support true accountability– assessments which can be used to improve teaching and student results. Sadly, the Hoover method was scrapped by state admin & replaced with packaged Global Assessments requiring 5y.o.’s to use computers, etc.– a result that echoes the ‘negative’, ‘anti-reform’ line you new posters wish to soft-pedal so as not to come across as anti-all-reform, we-were-OK-before.
I like what you all are saying: that we need to come across with new ideas for the future, to avoid being cast simply as supporters of the pre-status quo status quo. But you’ll find a detailed reading of this blog is simply loaded with such ideas.
Now let’s get back to today’s reality. The war has two fronts. One is the need for a forward-looking national message, well-expressed by these new posters. I look forward to a fertile exchange of ideas.
But the other is the political reality on the ground. The immediate and pressing need is to preserve a governmental structure for public education. Parents are the voters who will turn back the tide of Faux-Ed-Reform. They are already making their voices heard in Texas, Chicago, New York, New Orleans. Florida voters are starting to wake up. It can’t be too long before the parents in NC, Pa, AZ and CA begin to assess the deep damage and expense done already by faux-ed-reform. We must exert most energy at the moment to preserving the structure.
New ideas are evolving and will continue to evolve, but a lot of the problem in the past was not that we did not have quality programs but that the best was not available to the neediest communities. New is great but should build on the solid foundation we had AND extend to the communities most in need of support. In addition, we must recognize that poverty and the problems it nourishes must be addressed by the whole of society and not left to the confines of the educational system.
Diane, you gave the “reformers” a name in your “Reign of Error”…”Transformers.”
You wrote that privatizers and so-called “reformers” don’t actually want to “reform” public education but to “transform it into an entrepreneurial sector of the economy.” You said that corporate executives “believe in transformative change and disruptive innovation” which might work for business (though that is debatable) but not for education. The “reformers,” politicians, pundits and policy makers who seem hell-bent on destroying America’s public schools are “transformers” not reformers.
Stu,
Transform, like reform, has positive connotations.
In both cases, the word is corrupted by those who bring their punitive, harsh, early 20th century ideas about motivation and impose it on teachers and schools. There is nothing transformative about what the corporativists are doing. It is destructive and ignorant–destructive of an essential democratic institution and ignorant of child development.
I was about to claim that I didn’t agree that “transform” had a positive connotation until I looked it up and found that I was wrong.
I agree that corporate “reform” is not positive in any sense of the word.
The word reform has been totally corrupted, and the primary tenet of Education Deform, of the savage attack on public schooling and teachers and kids, has been that our schools are failing and need reform. The Deformers have mastered controlling the message by controlling the language. Reform is no longer usable. And every idiot real-estate salesperson who suddenly takes an interest in education becomes an InstaEduPundit with a Reform to peddle.
If we were to adopt “The Resistance,” what would happen?
A lot of Ed Deformers would cackle and make a big noise in the press about how we resist change, how we are obstructionists, AND THAT WOULD SERVE OUR CAUSE. It would clue people in that there is an organized opposition and provide opportunities for very public debate. Many are the appropriate connotations that “The Resistance” has. We are dealing with an INVASION and TAKEOVER of our schools by an outside force. Ours is a grassroots opposition, and our most effective tactics are resistance tactics, such as civil disobedience. We are dealing with a imposition on formerly free people of a distant, totalitarian authority. We fight for freedom.
No one ever rationally accused the French Resistance of not standing for anything because they were standing against something evil. Same applies here.
In other words, let’s make the Deformers into the unwitting carriers to the public of the message that there is an organized opposition to deform. Let them go on and on about the awful Resistance.
That would be very, very good, indeed, for our cause.
ENORMOUS HARM is being done to millions of kids by these deforms–by the test prep and the standardized tests and the distortions of curricula and pedagogy in the name of reform. ENORMOUS HARM is being done to hundreds of thousands of teachers via VAM and the attack on due process. ENORMOUS HARM is being done to public schools by those attempting to privatize them all.
And we have been quiet and namby pampy and unwilling to say, unequivocally,
We shall not let this continue. We shall resist the juggernaut rolling over our kids, our colleagues, our schools.
I got it We are the Hyperbole Insurgency.
Peter, if you do not believe that enormous harm is being done to kids, teachers, and schools by Education Deform, then it follows, clearly, that you would not think that there was something to which one would appropriately mount something called a resistance movement. That makes perfect sense.
Bob, I get what going on with the money driven reform.
But I want words that will work with PTAs and the like. When the hyperbole takes on the same tone as talk radio and Fox News, people turn off their hearing aids, despite the content.
So how do we win over the uninformed and undecided? I keep remembering the findings that even while people might say schools are failing, they think their school is doing fine.
Besides,mi think of this as a covert operation. I want to keep credibility until the strike.
Sensible comments, Peter, as usual from you. I appreciate, very much, this characteristic in your thinking.
I would like to see a LOT of those PTAs riled up. I would like to see them picketing the school on test days. I would like to see confrontation. A movement. News coverage. I would like to see that Democrats for Deform propaganda organ Time magazine (think: Pravda in the Soviet era) forced to acknowledge the resistance to deform on its cover.
That was a very witty reply, however.
These are the notes that I recently left on TestingTalk.org:
It is time for people to stop collaborating and resist. We all know that these completely unnatural, completely inauthentic summative testing situations make impossible the very approaches to exploring and creating texts that we encourage our students to take. What is done on these tests is not anything that any of us would call reading and writing. Let’s stop pretending that that is OK. It is not OK. These tests are obscenities. And so are the invariant and amateurish and prescientific CC$$ in ELA. We need to stop saying, let’s try to improve them. The Education Deformers have herded us all into this ghetto. Are we to spend our time here discussing how we might get them to treat us a little more kindly? Are we to petition for larger daily bread rations? Or are we going to resist? There are more of us than there are of them. It’s time to say no to Education Deform. Those of you who created this invaluable site have spent lifetimes thinking about these matters. You all know better than to continue encouraging this stuff. Encouraging acceptance of these amateurish, invariant standards and of these tests just hastens the metathesis of the Education Deform cancer throughout our K-12 system. You are leaders. Lead. You have done so by creating this site. Do so by speaking out, unequivocally. Stop the tests. Stop the abuse. Encourage voluntary, competing guidelines instead of invariant standards issued by CCCCMiniTru.
Do not collaborate with the Vichy regime that has taken over our schools. Push back against the CC$$, Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized. Push back against the establishment of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. Push back against the Powerpointing of U.S. education via bullet lists of invariant standards. Demand open-sourced, voluntary, competing standards, frameworks, guidelines, lesson templates, and learning progressions put forward by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and practitioners on an open wiki. Allow teachers to take back education from the plutocrats and the politicians and the sycophants and toadies among Educrats who serve them. Demand time for teachers to submit their own practice to continual reflection and refinement via Lesson Study. Real improvement flows from the bottom up. You know what flows from the top down. You are seeing that in the responses on these pages. Stop the testing. It is child abuse.
“There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop, And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Mario Savio, 1964
If an adversary is beating you senseless and without mercy, you should not meekly request that he beat you with less force, or less frequently, or with a smaller stick. And, your adversary has absolutely no right to demand that you give him an alternative to being beat before he agrees to stop.
The tide is turning.
The grass roots push back (The Resistance) is growing by the day.
Saying NO to Punitive, Test-Based Reform
Working Together to Stop the Madness
Parents love their children too much to let this go on.
When Arne Duncan starts walking back his BS, you know the CC advocates are on the run. The cracks in the wall of reform are spreading quickly
Other Spaces,
I’m not presenting mentor teachers as a new idea. Jeez. But, tell me, you referred to mentor teachers “in your district”. How much time did teachers get to spend with mentors? How often? Were they given the time to review lessons, come up with some specific potential improvements, and then meet regularly to check those and update?
That’s the type of program I’m talking about. Perhaps a better term is departmental academic coaches or something like that.