Social media is opening up a whole new world for those who lack access to the mass media.
In the mass media, we hear of great miracles.
Via social media, we learn the inside scoop.
This blog has a stunning story to tell about the experience of those who enter the New York City Teaching Fellows program.
It tells of idealistic and hopeful recruits who feel they are being used as cannon fodder: poorly trained and sent into some of the city’s toughest schools.
This is how the program begins: “We spent the summer drilling Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion classroom management techniques. It was eerily similar to basic training–been there, low-crawled under that–and at times had the haunting dehumanized uniformity reminiscent of a Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, many of us were grounded in our ideals of sharing our passion for learning, social justice, and community service. We knew as the summer training program unfolded that it was grossly inadequate and ill-conceived. This became ever more apparent when summer school began and we found ourselves utterly ill-equipped to properly care for our students’ intellectual and socio-emotional needs. However, ours was a tenacious bunch–seasoned overachievers who had long ago developed the stamina and fortitude to forgo sleep and self-care in order to reach a determined goal, no matter how distant.”
When our Teaching Fellow gets a letter from Chancellor Walcott thanking him for his service, he writes: “Well, you’re welcome Mr. Walcott. And thank you for supporting a program that sets interested-in-becoming-teachers and their students–who attend the least-resourced and highest-needs schools–up for failure. It’s heart-warming to know that you were once a kindergarten teacher and that you “understand” how difficult the first year teaching is…but nonetheless you support a program that is at its core unjust.”
The teacher asks whether this is a “just and effective program.”
We are left to wonder why our nation’s leaders think it is a great idea to send poorly trained people to teach the neediest students and why they care so little about supporting and retaining experienced teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ànd check out the comments. I wonder if Chancellor Walcott will honestly reflect and respond. Listen to your teachers, not the mayor.
Not a chance – Walcott is a political functionary whose entire existence is spent making his King Bloomberg happy.
There is not a shred of decency or humanity in him.
If there were, he wouldn’t send kids to schools with cancer-causing toxins or PCB’s in them while hiding those facts from parents.
If there, he wouldn’t have refused to test a Sandy-damaged school for mold until he was finally shamed into doing it by parents (and indeed, black mold was found in the building)
What is Walcott’s rationale for this?
To save Bloomberg money so that it can be spent on Common Core consultants or standardized tests.
That’s the kind of man Dennis Walcott is – someone who knowingly sends children and adults into buildings that will make them sick so that the DOE can use money that should have spent making the buildings safe on more important things – like Common Core consultants and standardized testing.
Once again the super-teacher narrative of Teach Like A Champion hurts educators in the field. When programs are based on this savior narrative it gives a false impression of the real life of teaching. It sets people up for failure.
This is not a true representation and a blanket situation. When one takes the task of doing any new job you will hit a learning curve. I was fine my first year and maybe it was because working with kids is something I enjoyed. There are a lot of ways people become successful at teaching and any educational program will tell you the successful traits needed to impact urban youths is not going to happen in your graduate course.
Not a true representation of what? Your experience? It’s
very much a true representation of my experience and of many of my
colleagues in the program. What are the “successful traits needed
to impact urban youths”? Are students attending upscale private
schools in Upper Manhattan considered “urban youth”? Do teachers
working in those contexts have the same “successful traits”?
Teaching is a complex profession that requires a rich skill set. To
insinuate that it only requires a certain “personality” or
predilection for working with young people is naive at best. Maybe
you “were fine” your first year because you did not grasp the
impact of your lack of experience. Perhaps you “were fine” because
you received more support. Not sure. Write your own story.
Very important story, Diane. The following quote rings true far beyond the Teaching Fellows program. She said, “…ours was a tenacious bunch–seasoned overachievers who had long ago developed the stamina and fortitude to forgo sleep and self-care in order to reach a determined goal, no matter how distant.”
This is such an apt description of the hard-working, conscientious teachers that I know and, truly without bragging, that I am. The more we are challenged, the harder we work to meet those challenges head on. We stay long after our students have gone home. Many of us work weekends. We research best practices, try new methods to help our kids achieve and talk to our colleagues in our schools, districts and beyond. We have developed a network of support via the Internet. We read pedagogical literature, blogs, comments and more in an attempt to deal with all the mandates thrown down at us from on high.
And I believe that the powers-that-be are fully aware of the nature of teachers to overachieve. My principal is extremely supportive, but often says, as he is handing down a new mandate, “I know this will be difficult, but I know that you will find a way to do [whatever].” Once challenged in this manner, of course, his overachieving staff steps up, often at great personal expense.
District administrators, state administrators and Federal bureaucrats must know that we are nearly never going to throw a mandate back in their laps. In my state, we often blame this behavior on the fact that we have never been unionized, but I do not see this as a union issue. The majority of teachers, by nature, are overachievers and that trait is an advantage to those who cannot stop telling us what to do without our input.
We are characters from the movie, Network. We’re “mad as hell and can’t take it any more.” But we stray from the script and we DO take more and more and more.
Can they break us? I worry every day that the last straw will do so. But then I keep going because I think about the little ones who rely on me for learning and care. Our giving nature, combined with our ‘no challenge is too great’ attitude, is our greatest asset and may be our undoing.
This teacher actually received more training than I did when I started. I took a test and bingo, I had a temporary license to teach. I hadn’t entered a high school since I graduated from one ten years earlier. I started after the school year began and I didn’t even have a classroom. I was never given any training, a mentor, or resources. All I got was constant harassment from a principal who prided herself in being able to fire any teacher. Constructive criticism is fine, bullying and not offering any help is cruel. She would actually show up in my classroom two minutes before the end of the day and yell at me because the students weren’t on task. You can show up in any classroom two minutes before the end of the day and most kids will be off task. Ironically, English was a critical shortage area at the time and the district made me permanent. At my end of the year evaluation, she told me she wouldn’t have hired me back but the district made me permanent. Out of sheer stubbornness and determination, I stuck it out and two years later the same principal was asking me to teach Advanced Placement classes and singing me praises. Go figure. You can read more about it on my blog “The Myth of the New Energetic Teacher” http://kafkateach.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/the-myth-of-the-new-energetic-teacher-2
“Principals–I am learning as I listen to my peers’ experiences and my mentor’s war stories–are often egocentric, power-hungry creatures. They are typically skilled bureaucrats who may begin with the purest intentions but are soon mired under the endless flow of accountability measures and the day-to-day minutiae. They–much like teachers–work ridiculous hours but too often turn their rage, inspired by the system’s intractable flaws, against their teachers. Untenured and under-prepared teachers are likely to be most vulnerable to their administrators’ wrath. We are, after all, the weakest link. The Achilles heel. We represent their own sense of inadequacy. As we stand before this impossible task of healing broken families, splintered communities, the result of generations of abject poverty and lack of access to quality education…”
This new teacher has an incredibly accurate perspective on the complexities of teaching. In a supportive and sane environment, I believe this individual would thrive, succeed, and develop into an outstanding teacher. My heart goes out to this teacher.
We are left to wonder why our nation’s leaders think it is a great idea to send poorly trained people to teach the neediest students and why they care so little about supporting and retaining experienced teachers.
Think Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, and other “I’m something new. I love and care about you, and I’m here to rescue you” movies and stories. I’m afraid programs such as NYC Teaching Fellows and TFA, and even the public in general, buy into these stories and believe all our students need are young, enthusiastic, loving teachers. Alas, teaching children isn’t that simple; it requires expertise like most corporate operatives have never encountered.
“…it [teaching] requires expertise like most corporate operatives have never encountered.”
Not if actual education isn’t actually the goal it doesn’t. Perhaps the general public buys into the “Freedom Writers” mind set, but I don’t believe for a minute that the corporate operatives do. They’re not in it to teach poor kids – in fact, that’s the last thing they want, competition for their own precious angels. What they want are the profits from privatizing one of the biggest sectors of the government. If getting the general public to believe the “Freedom Writers” crap helps with that mission, then they’ll promote it, but it doesn’t mean they believe it themselves.
I agree, Dienne, that most heading the corp-reform movement have dollar signs in their minds. However, there are many along the management line in corp-reform who fully believe they are on a righteous mission. It is this flavor of the movement that moves the public to action – in the wrong direction, of course.
Amen.
New York City Teaching Fellows (NYC TF) may as well put that last letter in its acronym and join up with TFA already. Sounds like a fancy name for a version of the same teacher-savior nonsense that TFA perpetuates.
As a NYC teacher who comments frequently about TFA on this site and others, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between it and Teaching Fellows.
While we can safely assume that anything and everything done by the NYC DOE is antagonistic towards teachers, in general Teaching Fellows themselves are quite different from TFA missionaries: they are frequently older, are often career changers, and most important, unlike the majority of TFAers, they enter the field intending to stay.
The DOE may wish to have them be a Fifth Column within the teaching force and union (like the despicable E4E), but in my experience they are far from that. They are are hard-working people who soon realize what all teachers are up against, and are aghast at the conditions they, their students and colleagues must face.
I’ve had numerous Fellows at my school, and most of them have stayed with us or in the classroom elsewhere, and all of them were grateful to have a union to defend them, even if it was the totally compromised UFT.
None of this is said in defense of Mc-licensing teachers, which the Teaching Fellows program inarguably is. It just needs to be pointed out that there is a qualitative difference between the Fellows themselves and the typical TFAer.
Thank you for the explanation of distinction. We have an alternate route program in my state that encourages people with experience in the workforce to enter the teaching profession with an emergency license which allows them to teach while earning the education credentials necessary for full certification. I’ve seen very few colleagues who have gone though the program but the ones who stayed in the profession observed mentor teachers for years.
@MichaelFiorillo… totally agree with you as the New York City Teaching Fellows Program looks for professionals who are making a long-term commitment to switching to a career in education and to staying for the long haul in the profession. It is not seen as a “stepping stone”. I suspect, however, that the Teaching Fellows coming on nowadays are facing a lot more adversity and a lack of principal’s willingness to accept the “lack of experience in their first few years of teaching because everything is about data.. flawed and all!
While the experiences of the commenter are unfortunate data seems to be at variance with his experience – a recent study comparing traditional and alternative certification teachers found attrition rates to be the same and effectiveness as measured by student test scores to also be the same …
(http://www.mail.givewell.com/files/unitedstates/TFA/Kane,%20Rockoff,%20and%20Staiger.%202006.%20What%20does%20certification%20tell%20us.%20NBER.pdf)
In my experience working with Teaching Fellows in NYC, primarily older career changers, I have been impressed, as far as the training their experiences vary widely according to the support they receive in the schools to which they are assigned.
Teachers from traditional teacher education programs also struggle in their first year and attrition rates are about the same.
While what you say is true, if you only look at the data, it doesn’t hold water if you take a larger view. What this Teaching Fellow (and many others are doing) is highlighting the gross mismanagement of the entire education system. These people are generally successful career-changers who have come from the “real” world of business and they are gobsmacked by the lack of support and resources combined with the ever-increasing bureaucratic demands that are based in anything but reality.
I don’t know if it is was your intention to imply that it’s OK for any teacher to struggle in their first year and that since attrition rates are similar there is no problem to speak of but I would hold that both of these startling statements suggest a deeply flawed, broken system that is in great need of re-imagining and reorganization.
Why is it acceptable that a new, inexperienced employee is left to flounder with little to no meaningful support? Why is it acceptable that half of all employees leave the profession entirely within the first 5 years of employment? Why is it acceptable that urban teachers (and increasingly, all teachers outside of wealthy enclaves) are expected to produce miracles with little or no supplies, materials, curricula, textbooks, or meaningful training?
Is this really the best that we can do in the year 2013 with a $600 billion dollar education budget in the United States of America? Are we really OK with letting a very large percentage of the children of this generation be subjected to this kind of damaging churn and lack of care?
These are the questions this post and those like it raise for me. Not that ‘well, things aren’t any better for traditionally-trained teachers, so we say “So what?”‘ and move on. I doubt that we are served by a mindset that claims “Because I struggled needlessly those who follow must struggle needlessly as well. It will make them tough and better.” That allows the injustices and egregious systems to continue unchallenged and without examination. Surely we can and must and want to do better?
Many thoughtful comments on this posting.
It struck me how much the rheephormistas are stuck in repeating the worst mistakes of the past. During the nineteenth and twentieth many armchair generals continued to hurl massive numbers of rank-and-file soldiers and field officers against rapid-fire weapons and high explosives. Sheer numbers and determination and reckless abandon by others surely would prevail. A mark of heroic determination by the Bloombergs and Walcotts of the time? Hardly. Too often it was simply the reflex action of desperately incompetent leaders who lacked imagination and refused to learn from experience.
The same mindset prevails today among the leaders of so-called education reform. Simply throw willing [or otherwise] recruits into a meat grinder, then blame subordinates [first and foremost the front line troops, i.e., teaching staff] for the predictable lack of success.
One of the most insidious aspects of the present situation is that many recruits are led to believe that many of those fighting alongside them are the real problem: they’re not working hard enough, long enough, well enough. New and fresh against old and stale.
Divide and conquer starts with a mindset. This blog helps break that mindset.
I sat at a Gotham Schools fundraiser and watched Doug Lemov’s amazing video about how one teacher passed out papers very quickly, and about how miraculous it was, and about how he saved valuable minutes for doing Very Important Stuff. Oddly, as a lowly public school teacher, I had passed out forty pages of handouts at once, thus saving me the trouble of repeating the action thirty-nine times, no matter how fast it was. Yet brilliant and revolutionary thinkers like Doug Lemov have never seen fit to consult or film me. I guess my twenty-eight years of experience leave me with nothing whatsoever to offer new teachers.
Oh, Arthur, I know that video. That’s the crap we watched
throughout the summer training. Laughable only if one is able to
divorce oneself from the brutal reality.
I have worked with teachers trained from far and wide…
Grad school, Fellows and TFA aside…
The issue is the same.
Their quality has ranged
From sublime to I hope they change
Jobs that is.
What is interesting to me
and what I do see
is that the trainers are best
and this is not in jest
when they themselves are gifted more than the rest.
BTW> Mike Fiorillo…
Are you from the Bronx? Did you go to Fordham? Your name looks so familiar.
Hmmm. I was a Teaching Fellow. I thought the pre-service, under a remarkable teacher named Jennifer Chick, was incredible and left me as prepared as I could possibly be in a condensed amount of time. By contrast, my ed school experience at Mercy College left much to be desired. In two years, I cannot tell you very much that I learned that was of use in my South Bronx classroom (although I do recall turning in the same project three times in two years). Worse still was five years of school-based PD, which was very nearly worthless. In the end, I have a complicated relationship with alt-cert programs like the Fellows and TFA. Such programs open the profession to a lot of capable people who might otherwise not be in the classroom. But it’s naive to believe that such routes of entry are The Answer. They’re not. In the end, the math is what it is: there are 3.2 million teachers in our classrooms. We need to make each of them as effective as possible. I see no reason to think that traditional routes or alt-cert routes have anything like the perfect formula for creating great practitioners. But if this writer seems to believe that traditional routes leave new teachers better prepared “to properly care for our students’ intellectual and socio-emotional needs” I’d be interested to know what exactly that conclusion is based on. A good case can be made that alt-cert leaves new teachers inadequately trained. But I see no reason to think traditional routes are any better.
Well put.
Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows programs, deny the value of having a highly-professionalized teaching force and “de-professionalize teaching by emphasizing talent over training.” (See Rachel Levy, “Teach For America: From Service Group to Industry,” All Thing Education blog, 28 May 2011; accessed July 2011 at http://allthingsedu.blogspot.com/2011/05/teach-for-america-from-service-group-to.html)
Also, For a discussion of the Fellows which begins with their ads warns “aspirants not to fall for the gauzy sales pitch,” see Stacy Cowley and Neil deMause, “Your Own Personal Blackboard Jungle: Fresh from the frontlines, New York Teaching Fellows tell all,” The Village Voice, Jul 24 2007; accessed at http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-07-24/art/your-own-personal-blackboard-jungle/.
Finally, you can look for the article/chapter I’m working on now, “Teaching Fellows, Teach for America and How they show Teachers in Movies,”
Robert Pondiscio said, ” A good case can be made that alt-cert leaves new teachers inadequately trained. But I see no reason to think traditional routes are any better.” Actually there is a lot of evidence that points that way. I say this as someone who did follow an alternative certification path and thinks they should be available for all the reasons you say — after all, some of the best teachers I have worked with over the last 18 years have come from such programs. Clearly, they attract a lot of good people.
But when I rec’v’d my alternative certification it was because there was a shortage of teachers in NY. That was the original justification back in 1999 for the Fellows in New York. Moreover, while there are differing memories of its early days, this seems also to have been the justification for TFA.
Now, however, both the Fellows and TFA have experienced mission creep. They are part of the ‘transformation of teaching’ in the US that is being promoted not only by Arne Duncan and the US DOE, but by a wide variety of groups from the Gates MET project to the Hope Street Group to State Legislators in a lot of places, not to mention Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Steve Brill, the NTP, Dems for Ed Reform and Oprah.
Having known a lot of fellows over the years with views similar to yours and similar complaints about Mercy College, I would not dismiss them. I would, however, point out that taking Masters Classes at the same time you have a full-time teaching job for the first time is likely to leave you dissatisfied and over-worked no matter what the quality of the course. Most fellows teach the Masters as a signaling device — a hoop to jump through. I am not condemning that, but I am saying that in other circumstances people would do other things.
It would be hard for me to believe that the same person who started after a summer intensive course would not have been a better teacher from the beginning if they had gone through at least one year of a two-year program as a full-time student and for the second year did not teach full-time. For instance, if soon-to-be-teachers had more time, they would be able to reflect on the field they are entering, become part of support network, take classes seriously and get something out of even the worst classes. And they probably would not even want to hand in the same project three times. If Mr Gates and Mr Broad and Mr Koch and the other Mr. Koch want to look for a worthwhile thing to spend their money on, then giving fellowships to study (with stipends) might fit the bill.
To the degree to which I was an effective teacher, there was only one thing that made me so: classroom experience.
Agreed. I would add to that content area professional development and course work. General ed classes and staff wide professional development tend to be a torturous waste of time.
Just a quick follow up — I didn’t mean to point any fingers. When I was completing my certification, I did what was expedient and I don’t blame anyone for doing that.
But that is the point — there is a significant downside to alternative certification not only because the starting teacher has less training than is optimal, but also because the teacher has too much work teaching to devote sufficient time to being a student.
That seems obvious to me, but it is rarely mentioned.
You know… all this being said, experienced, excellent teachers are just not lining up to take the difficult jobs at some of the toughest high need schools. My experience is that several of the experienced excellent teachers I know also don’t want to teach at those schools, they feel they’ve done their time and want a ‘good’ school.
Did you hear the one about the parent who wanted the least experienced teacher for their child? ….it’s not all that funny. http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2012/12/have-you-heard-one-about.html #satire
Diane, you won’tt be surprised to learn that Lemov is the scheduled motivational speaker at the New York State Network Team institute on Feb. 4. Here is how the presentation is described: Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better
with Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi
This session will provide participants an opportunity to learn about the new book by Lemov, et al. and reflect upon what it takes to effectively turn-key adult learning, provide meaningful coaching and feedback,
and grow in our practice – every day!
Turn key is not a verb. When they can write English grammatically, we may take them seriously.
The Monday before Thanksgiving I stepped into my classroom in a high-needs inner city Middle School. I had 18 years of teaching experience before I had retired in June. I was coming in as a favor to friends in the building to replace a first year teacher who had not worked out.
He was idealistic. He was also a product of the DC Teacher Corps, which like that in NY and in Teach for America provides insufficient training for someone even for an easy to teach classroom. Simply put, he was in over his head, he was never able to get his feet on the ground.
We have had teachers who were knew succeed in our school, but almost all of those had complete preparation, not a 5-week quickie prep.
One more point – I think Lemov is simplistic. It is the same mindset that presumed during the teacher effectiveness movement of the 80s that if you simply emulate the behaviors of those acknowledged to be superior teachers you too will be a superior teacher. From my observations of other teachers, my own experience, and my knowledge of the literature, this is simply not the case. What makes a teacher effective is an ability to connect with her students, which means meeting them where they are, finding ways of connecting their prior knowledge and interests with the curricular material at hand. It requires taking the time to get to know the students. Most of all, it requires being genuine, being yourself and trusting the students with yourself if you are going to trust them to take the intellectual and emotional risks to get outside of their comfort zones. if this sounds like Vygotsky and the Zone of Proximal Development, well I happen to think that is more perceptive of what we need to do as teachers than Lemov’s approach.
Lemov is crowd control for newbies. It is a way to maximize efficiency because you don’t trust your teaching abilities and you have to control the kids somehow.
This is the same as the charter chain philosophy where they make statements such as: “We have to give them the culture they need.” And that was stated by a chief of discipline or some nonsense title in a CT city charter chain (our commissioner has close ties ton this one) ..they get sent to the reorientation room to get the “culture they need”.
Not sure exactly what that means, but it implies the young white over achiever who is temping for a while is going to show the brown kid how to act to be accepted and “successful” in their society.
Teach like a robot is their bible. Practicing the steps ad nauseum is the training.
So sad, so true.
If you are a greedy, power hungry sociopathic so called leader this is the answer. No where in any professional world are you considered to be competent with only a few weeks training. When you then get to this being training for those who need the most help in the lowest income most violent and crime ridden neighborhoods it becomes ludicrous. This cannot be an accident. This concept is so out there it has to be planned for destruction for almost all except the elite future controllers. This is their plan as crazy as it sounds. Just look at what they are doing do not listen to what they say. The proof is in the pudding.
I’m not a fan of alternative certification programs, but I think they do draw in many dedicated, hard-working candidates like this blogger. But what a shame that they’re giving intensive drilling in Lemov disciplinary techniques (including some like correcting students’ grammar that show no understanding of language variation across different American communities). You could do a lot more than this in a short period of time to help prepare teachers going into tough situations in urban settings. This alternative programs are very sink-or-swim, and victimize the potential teachers involved when they waste their time with pointless rather than intelligent preparation.
I completely agree! I have just started working as a summer coach for the Fellows and find this same drilling you mention to be a complete time- and brain-waste. When I ask people I meet who are recent grads of the summer PST program, they inevitably have reported that they just “play the game” through summer to get through it, and then do their best to immerse more meaningfully in teaching and learning practice in their subsequent grad classes. What a waste of time to be creating robot teachers when we need a reflective and responsive teaching body who are thinking critically and having intelligent dialogue about teaching and learning.
I may not be popular for saying so but I really valued my experience as a NYCTF. It was one the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. Yes, going out in working in tough inner city schools is hard, but it’s hard no matter what training you receive.
I also value this experience. It’s unclear to me how you can make the statement “it’s hard no matter what training your receive.” What other training experience did you have prior to becoming a first-year teacher?
Dear ajw, can you comment any further on your experience as a NYCTF? In your opinion, is it the experience of the majority in the program positive, as was your case? Any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated. I am interested in applying for the NYC TF, but recently stumbled across kalisaddhu’s blog (and many of the comments) have me re-considering whether this is really a good idea (I am a ‘career changer’, and very hard working/determined, but I also don’t want to set myself up for failure- ex: perhaps it would be better to focus on teaching methods at a traditional teaching certification program, get a few years of teaching under my belt, and then transfer to a high need school at that point).