Emily Talmage recently reposted an interview she had with Jim Horn, editor of Schools Matter. Horn wanted to interview teachers who had taught in KIPP or KIPP-like schools, and Emily responded. She shared her experiences with him in 2011 and decided the interview remained relevant and worthy of reposting.
She writes:
I am re-posting the interview here for a couple reasons:
First, at Brooklyn Ascend, we relied heavily on Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion,” – a book that has been the subject of a number of posts going around the internet right now. I want people to understand what my experience was like with these teaching methods.
Second, I have become increasingly concerned by parallels between the practices used at Ascend (and schools like it) with the system of education that I have written a great deal about on this blog, known in Maine as “proficiency-based” education, but elsewhere as “competency-based” or “mastery” learning. In these systems, as at Ascend, “outcomes” reign supreme – meaning that all learning must be observable, skill-based, and measurable. Teachers have very little autonomy; instead, they are treated like technicians. Micromanagement is the norm. Children’s performance on assessments are the “bottom line.” The natural joy, humanity, and messiness of real learning are lost.
Then follows a lengthy interview, which is fascinating. Emily is referred to as “R.” It is well worth reading the whole exchange.
INT: When you went looking for an opportunity to teach in a charter school, can you talk about that a little bit? Why a charter school?
R: At the time I didn’t know a whole lot about them. I actually hadn’t seen it yet. I had seen the advertisement for Waiting for Superman. I had this idea in my head that charter schools were, and I think I even said at the time that they were, “getting the job done.” I didn’t really know what I meant by that. What I was looking for was just a different type of experience after working at the public school that I had been at for three years. I had heard that you can get paid more at a charter school. I had heard that they treat teachers more like professionals at charter schools. I don’t even know what else I heard.
I went on the web sites, and I had found a couple of schools that had really nice looking websites. Harlem Success had one. There was this school called Harlem Village Academy in Harlem that had one also. I had heard that charter schools are closing the achievement gap. There are these certain schools that are really making it work. I didn’t really do my homework before I got into it. A lot of what ended up happening, ended up really surprising and disappointing me.
INT: Let’s talk a little bit about that. I guess I could phrase it this way. How was the experience of working in a school different from your expectations?
R: I had thought that I would be treated like a professional, and that teaching would somehow be seen as a respected job. I don’t really know what I expected, looking back. I know that when I got there, they immediately changed what I had applied to do. I had applied to be, and they had hired me as a third grade pull out teacher.
A couple of months into the year, they gave the students a mock ELA test and a mock math test. They panicked, and realized that the kids weren’t really doing very well, or that they weren’t on track, just pulling threes and fours at the end of the year. They decided to completely rearrange the third grade.
INT: What kind of tests did they give them?
R: They gave them a mock ELA. You know New York State has a state exam each year, and they gave them a mock test. I think it was one from one of the previous years. These are done about once a month, all through the school year, gave them a mock test to see what their progress was. They completely changed it, and then they decided to restructure the third grade.
They had us come in over Christmas break, and told us that I was no longer going to be the pull out teacher. They were going to put all of the lowest performing kids into one class, and have it so there was the low, medium and high class. Now all of a sudden, I had a class of thirty scholars, we had to call them. I was only allowed to teach reading and math. I really wasn’t even allowed to plan my own lessons.
That was a big difference than what I had expected versus what actually happened. I had it in my head that I would be working in this place where teaching is really respected. Then I ended up having to spoon feed to the kids. They were handing everything to me, saying, “You have to teach this lesson, and this lesson.” I felt more like a robot for a while, to be honest. It was pretty miserable.
INT: What were these lessons like? Were they scripted lessons? Did you have a script?
R: What they did is we had at Brooklyn Ascend a data analyst. She’s a former Teach for America person. I think she was a PhD in Data Instruction, or something like that. Basically, she took the mock ELA and the mock math data and analyzed it, and came up with these certain concepts that the kids weren’t doing well on. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on the main idea questions. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on making inferences in narrative procedure type passages. Just pulled right from the test. I’m trying to get this all right. Our data analyst basically pulled out these skills from looking at the mock data. I remember another thing that really surprised me which was that I didn’t have any authority to actually assess the kids myself. Which for me was really disappointing because I had come from working with a really small group, and that was a big part of what I enjoyed about teaching. Really getting to know the kids, and figuring out on a really deep level what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, why they’re struggling in some parts of reading and not others. That was something I loved about teaching.
All of a sudden, I had no power to do that at all. We had to use documents placed in front of us that said, “This percentage needs to work on this.” Our school Director, who incidentally a Teach for America graduate, decided to take one of the second grade teachers and put her in charge of the third grade. We now had this supervisor, and it was her job to come up with these scripted lessons that we would then have to present to the kids.
INT: You had a script. You had something to say, and the children had something that they were supposed to say back to you?
R: Some of it was. The lessons were scripted in that it was all written, like say such and such to the kids. We had to do this thing where we had to snap our fingers and then the kids would repeat it back. To me it was just complete and utter nonsense. The kids aren’t learning a thing this way. It blew me away. For some reason, nobody said anything about it, either. Everybody was just going along with this way of teaching. I don’t know–It felt like we were training dogs, with all the snapping.
INT: Was their chanting also?
R: We had to do the chanting, oh yeah. Every morning we had to start out. The way it worked is the kids would come in at seven-thirty. They came in silently. They had to walk in single file. The first thing that would happen would they would stop in front of the doors to the cafeteria. There would be a teacher sitting there who would pull up their shirt, and make sure they had a belt on. Pull up their pants, pull up the bottoms and make sure they had on the right color shoes, and the right color socks. If the top three buttons weren’t buttoned, she’d button up the top button.
The kids would come in and they had to have breakfast completely silently, which I think is what they do at KIPP. I’m not positive. A completely silent breakfast, which was also fairly disappointing to me because at my old school, breakfast was a time when I’d chat with the kids about their weekend. Get a sense of where they were at in their lives. What was going on with them. Are they having good days? Are they having bad days? Did they get their homework done? Do they need any help with it? This was a time to chat with the kids. It was also a time I really liked. Now I had to be completely, completely silent.
As teachers, we were required to carry these clipboards that had a list of each child’s name. Any time we had to give a kid a “correction,” we had to mark it on the chart. If a kid whispered to another one during breakfast, we had to write down “talking.” We had what I think at some schools they call it “Slant,” but at Brooklyn Ascend we called it STAR. They had to sit up tall, track the speaker, attention forward, respect always. That’s what it stands for. At breakfast, everybody’d come in silently, eat their breakfast silently. They had a choice to either take out a book, or they had to sit with their hands folded in front of them. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to them. Sometimes I’d secretly try to walk beside them and whisper, “Did you have a good weekend? Is everything okay?”
They’re eight year olds, and they need somebody to check in with. At least that’s the way I feel. I had one little girl who I had moved into a shelter, but we had to whisper about it at breakfast. She had to whisper and tell me, “Things are okay.” (Deep sigh.) It was awful. A silent breakfast. Silent breakfast would stop when one of the head teachers — our third grade supervisor would stop and say, every morning was the same thing, it was “Good morning, scholars.” They’d say, “Good morning, Miss ….” Then we’d say, “How do you feel today?” Then they would say, “Hungry for knowledge to get us to college.”
Then we’d do some other type of cheer, “Pick up your pencils, and you will be rewarded” was another one. These all come right out of, I don’t think they come from KIPP but I know that they use them at the Uncommon Schools, and a lot of the other charter schools in the area. Every morning, right before you went upstairs, we had to say this one cheer, “What’s out destination (clap clap)? Higher education.” Have you heard that one before?
Thank you for posting, Diane! You can read the full interview here: http://emilytalmage.com/2015/09/28/teach-like-a-champion-or-like-a-robot/
Emily Talmage: I applaud your courage in not sparing anyone, yourself included, in your interview.
If I may, from a genuine American hero:
“Truth is powerful and it prevails.” [Sojourner Truth]
Let me add a personal note, something I have mentioned on this blog before. In my middle school in Detroit I was one of five white students and the rest black in a school of approx. 1500 students—of course, almost the entire staff were white.
Two close neighbors—self-described as “hillbillies” and “white trash” originally from Tennessee—were the victims of a group of black students that verbally and physically beat the hell out of them because they were white. I was lucky—I got the verbal abuse but the couple of times they went after me I was able to dodge through backyards and streets and avoid the physical abuse. [Although there was that kid that sucker punched me for no reason in HS and they didn’t suspend him but they wanted to suspend and possibly kick me out…]
I say this without mental reservations of any kind: those kids, and anyone like them from any background, were and are not animals and deserve the kind of support and education that rheephorm is dead set on denying to so many.
Period. No excuses for the adults that won’t permit any child the kind of support and learning opportunities you wanted to provide your students.
“If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?” [Jim Hightower]
Thank you for coming forward when so many prefer to be quiet. Voices like yours need to be heard.
😎
Reblogged this on World's Greatest Detective of Education and commented:
Unbelievable. Here is the pinnacle of education “reform” — brought to you by entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, politicians, economists….
Former colleagues and I always talked about how things need to “look good”. This is a perfect example. Why are we so worried about things “looking good”? How fake. These are kids. We need to build them, support them, and teach them (age appropriately).
You say Lemov, I say Pavlov.
…and Skinner.
The solution is to convince the parents of these children that this is not education. The question is how to do that?
Without high stakes test scores to boast about, what do these schools have? OPT OUT and let the charters realize that their proof of “success” is meaningless.
I fully agree. But my experience with a lot of low income parents, especially African-American parents, is that they like the focus on strict discipline and test scores/rote information. It makes them feel like they can actually see/know what their kid is learning. Given the history of racism in education, many black parents are not readily trusting of the more fuzzy stuff that educators know to be real education.
I’m curious – did most students manage to achieve those high scores? I agree they are meaningless, but did this method ultimately work for all the kids? Or did many of them opt out of the school itself?
Getting kids to score better on bubble tests while narrowing curricula is not a true educational gain. It is just posturing for PR purposes.
Saw it
Sent from my iPad
>
I really wish Arne Duncan’s children were forced to spend one entire year at that Ascend school. With the Obama girls in a different class the following year.
Maybe then it is possible that they would see how terrible their “reform” has been. No Republican could have done what they did to promote charter schools and they are single handedly responsible for their growth. If they are proud that they have made this the model for teaching kids, then they should force their own kids to spend a year at that school to see how pleasant the experience is and pray they aren’t permanently damaged.
The fact that Arne’s wife does admissions at a private school that is about as opposite as the ones her husband directs billions of tax dollars to is appalling. The fact that Arne’s wife hasn’t insisted that every child who wants to come to her school take the state exams and be judged ONLY at the results of those state exams is appalling.
I TOTALLY agree that Arne Duncan has been a fiasco
but
I totally disagree that “no Republican could have done what they did to promote charter schools’.
As I read the Republican agenda and listen to the Republican contenders for the White House
not only charters but so VERY much which affects education in all its aspects would be a disaster.
It takes a Democrat to agree to these things instead of explaining what is wrong with privatizing education.
The Republicans have been trying for vouchers and privatization for decades and the Democrats have made it clear they support public schools. That is, until President Obama and Arne Duncan said charter schools were the best and directed huge amounts of funding while completely bashing public schools, their teachers, and the parents who use them (see Duncan talking about suburban moms). All the Republicans’ desires were nothing because most of the population disagreed. Once Obama was on board, that changed.
Same thing is happening with social security “reform”. Republicans have been trying for decades to privatize it and convince Americans it was no good. But the Dems held fast and the public supported them.
I suspect that in his last year, Obama will try to “reform” social security and make some compromise that involves lots more money from the poor and middle class, a bit more from the rich, and putting some of that money into “private” accounts that the same people who believe in “school reform” are dying to get to manage. And it will take a Democrat President to get that kind of “reform” done in the name of compromise which usually means accepting 100% the things the Republicans wanted during the Bush administration (but now seem “moderate” thanks to the crazies taking over).
I read a little bit about this and I was surprised to see this:
Technique 40: Sweat the Details Building on the “broken window” theory of policing, Lemov notes that maintaining high standards will have positive effects across the classroom environment.
“Broken windows” policing is actually really controversial. It was widely adopted in the 1980’s and 1990’s but there are quite a few people who believe it led to our current “high arrest” environment, with all the misery that goes along with that. The proponents of the theory say it was misused, that they never intended for it to have all these negative consequences but at the time it was promoted (mostly in the 1990’s) it was sold as “data-based” and anyone who doubted whether arresting a huge group of people for minor infractions was a good idea was told it was all very scientific- based on “data” and therefore could not be questioned.
“A lot of sins have been committed in the name of “broken windows.” That is the name the late criminologist James Q. Wilson and I gave to a new theory of policing more than 30 years ago—it was the title of an essay we published in in the Atlantic in 1982—in which we argued that small things matter in a community and, if nothing is done about them, they can lead to worse things. We expressed this in a metaphor: Just as a broken window left untended in a building is a sign that nobody cares, leading typically to more broken windows—more damage—so disorderly conditions and behaviors left untended in a community are signs that nobody cares and lead to fear of crime, more serious crime, and urban decay.”
I just think it’s wild to cite “broken windows” when dealing with 8 years old, particularly because the whole theory is now being re-examined in policing and criminal justice.
How did a policing theory end up in schools?
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/broken-windows-theory-poor-policing-ferguson-kelling-121268#ixzz3oN13VTz3
Well stated. I totally agree.
So very much of the things in the news in which the police have made horrendous mistakes are at the bottom line attributable to the ‘broken windows” theory.
AND
why should such a miserable ;philosophy be used in our educational system?
Look at Rudy Giuliani, NYC police, mayoral comtrol of schools, debunked race theory such as the Bell Curve, and you will be able to connect the dots.
Giuliani is a huge proponent of Broken Windows theory, school reform, and racial profiling. It was only natural for all this evil quackery to converge on inner city school children under the guise of reform.
the whole situation makes me throw up in my mouth.
In my experience, public schools are the final resting place for all kinds of discredited theories and policies, in the same way that obsolete technologies get dumped there. They gotta go somewhere.
There’s a reason KIPP is also known as the KIds In Prison Program.
Broken windows because these schools are run just like a boot camp: “a disciplinary facility or program in which young offenders are forced to participate in a rigidly structured routine.” Students are guilty from the get go for being children and teens. Teachers are like drill sergeants delivering so called tough love and in accordance with “the strict father” theory of raising kids, so named by George Lakoff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_father_model
They are guilty of being children of a certain skin color, not just children. What white parents would tolerate their children being put through pre-prison training in elementary school? Few indeed.
And we shouldn’t forget the teachers who buy into this s!@#%t as well.
How is this not child abuse?
It obviously is child abuse. It’s disgusting and really old thinking; pre-Pestalozzi.
I was in the NYC Teaching Fellows 5 week “training” with Emily. ( a group of uis spent about 7 hours a day learning, debating, arguing, crying, and laughing) She’s been a smart, articulate, dedicicated educator from day 1. It pleases me to see her get a larger audience, her voice must be heard.
As a high school science teacher, I find the part where only students who scored well on the test were allowed to get lessons in science and social studies to be very disturbing. Those are core subjects, in addition to being very important for students to know about, not to mention engaging for students. What does it say that so many students simply don’t get access to them?
Actually, who am I kidding? The part where students don’t get a chance to talk (except to respond to the teacher in a few words) from when they enter school until lunch is far worse. Are we literally preparing kids for prison?
A child only has one second grade (or any grade) – school should be a great place to be – full of exciting activities, exploration, creativity and curiosity. Shame on those who would make it otherwise.
A child only has one third grade (or any grade) – school should be a great place to be – full of exciting activities, exploration, creativity and curiosity. Shame on those who would make it otherwise.
did not mean to post twice but she was talking about third grade so I tried to correct it- can you erase a post after you post it or no ?.
Reminds me of a few movies I’ve seen. Matilda comes to mind. The difference in the way the disciplinarian principal and how Miss Honey had to hide all the fun stuff. Roald Dahl tended to write books with intention and moral. You see how that one came out. Miss Honey and they had to build a new school because nobody wanted to leave.