Caleb Rossiter resigned as a math teacher at Friendship Public Charter School in D.C.
He wrote an open letter to the Board of Trustees of the school explaining why.
Here is a selection from his brutally frank letter.
“I recently resigned from a position as a ninth grade Algebra 1 teacher at Technology Preparatory because of unremitting pressure from the administration to alter failing grades and the return to my classroom of two students whose actions threatened the safety of other students. These issues are related to a fundamental question about Tech Prep’s mission: can it successfully implement a college preparatory, let alone a STEM, curriculum for the ninth grade when a significant minority of that grade has math skills that are below the third grade level or consistently exhibits disruptive behaviors that keep both this minority and their peers from achieving?
“There appear to be strong institutional pressures on administrators to achieve high enrollment figures, pass rates, and scores on grade-level standardized tests. These pressures flow down to the classroom, where they collide with the reality of severe academic and behavioral deficits, creating the sort of situations that led to my resignation.
“The administration pressured me to raise failing grades for the first quarter to grades that students had not earned. I was told by a supervisor that my intention to report 30 percent of my students as having earned a failing grade — due to low rates of doing class work and homework, which led to poor performance on assessments – “cannot be.” I was told that this would be “bad for the school” because it would have to be reported to the Public Charter School Board as evidence that students “were not on track to graduate” and that it also would be “bad for me.” I was asked to raise grades, or to change the weighting of the different categories of grades listed in my syllabus that had been sent to parents so that the grades would rise.
“The pressure was not successful with me, but I know that it was with teachers of these same students in other courses who had similar provisional failure rates. This casts into doubt for me all the grades reported for the ninth grade. When the second quarter started, the supervisor met with me and continued to press me to raise grades, including suggesting that failing students who completed one homework assignment in a week of five of them be given credit for all of them…..”
Read the rest of the post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not just the charter schools. I have the same problem when it comes to academics. A majority of my students are reading two to three years below grade level. While I have few major discipline issues, minor discipline issues accumulate and are left unchallenged. Homework is a joke, it’s all I can do to convince students to work in class. Administrators are overwhelmed with paperwork and discipline issues. The mantra is “keep the kids in the classroom.” Well, they don’t work in the classroom and disrupt everyone else’s learning.
Once again, the power of magical expectations is at play.
“It’s not just the charter schools.” — so true.
Same with my previous neighborhood’s local public school — East St. Louis. Consider the incongruence of proficiency rates as compared to high school graduation rate:
East St. Louis High School Proficiency Rates (2012):
(via Illinois Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE) Results)
http://www.greatschools.org/illinois/east-st.-louis/1871-East-St.-Louis-Senior-High-School/?tab=test-scores
Math – 5%
Reading – 10%
Science – 7%
East St. Louis High School Graduation Rates:
http://www.schools-data.com/schools/EAST-ST-LOUIS-SENIOR-HS-EAST-SAINT-LOUIS.html
Click to access esl-hs-d187.pdf
High School Graduation Rate – 67-70%
How does a near entire high school graduating student body that possesses math/reading/science skills of 5th graders possess a 70% high school graduation rate? You socially promote/graduate students from elementary to middle to high school, just as Dr. Rossiter was asked to do at his D.C. public charter school.
How do you teach in a highly segregated, highly impoverished school where you’re more of a day-care provider than a teacher?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/27/us/embed-america-east-st-louis-education/
How do you teach in a public school that has recurring incidents of violence in/out the classrooms and in the hallways (fights, stabbings, rapes, shootings)?
http://www.ksdk.com/video/934437628001/0/Student-stabbed-at-East-St-Louis-High-School
http://www.ksdk.com/video/86435477001/1/Shooting-fights-erupt-outside-East-St-Louis-High-School
No amount of redistribution of school district funds to poorly performing schools is possible, because the entire district is poor. There are no wealthy enclaves to pull tax dollars from.
No amount of additional financial incentives will lure experienced teachers to this war zone; most highly experienced teachers don’t want to walk past drug dealers, homeless people, pimps, prostitutes, city-sponsored brothels, vacant/burnt out houses, etc. on their way to/from work.
No amount of newly publicized (and court supported) class-based desegregation policies will help this community — everyone’s poor, almost everyone’s black, and almost no parents have education beyond high school.
No application of recently touted community based accountability will help this school district; low adult education levels, severe nepotism, financial corruption, etc. make it difficult to find competent, credible community members that can implement CBA.
This level of severe race/class segregation and severe poverty is experientially unknown to most people. I understand Dr. Ravitch’s long term goal of great schools for all, and increased sustained funding for schools like those in East St. Louis School District, although I have a skeptical view of how many decades (if ever) it will take to accomplish this. I understand Geoffrey Canada’s and Dave Levin’s desire to secure additional private funds and decouple from public education to try something new via charter schools, although this approach seems unscalable. I understand the frustration Dr. Rossiter professes in his resignation letter when stating he can’t teach in a school with leadership mandated social promotion policies and unsafe classrooms, although his story is common in both public schools and public charter schools.
Although Dr. Ravtich’s blog generally rails against most charters in support of public education as a public good, this post seems unnecessarily out of context in her blog. Could have just as easily been referring to a public school.
Folks beat me to the punch about this going on in neighborhood public schools as well. I saw more nonsense and fraud going on with both grades and attendance in one particular urban district that I was appalled. And good teachers are being bullied into untenable positions or simply having grades and attendance records changed over their objections or without their direct knowledge until well after the fact.
And why are there more whistleblowers? Do I really have to answer?
Sadly, public schools are doing the same thing. Everyone seems to be on the corporate payroll or at least on the “wannabe” corporate payroll somewhere. In order to achieve their goal to look as though “they” are successful, they keep teachers from doing their job of teaching by not addressing the myriad of problems surrounding the needs of students in order for them to learn. No one, NO one looks at what the real problems are in education. It’s a constant “blame the teacher”. How sad that our corporate and political, so-called, leaders, would rather a school appear to be doing well than actually getting done to why it’s struggling and dealing with the problems at hand. I constantly feel like no one cares except those who are willing to do what this teacher has done and for those like Diane Ravitch, who is more than willing to “call like it is”. Most sit in silence unless it is happening directly to them. If that continues, it will be too late.
So much for the “magic” of charter schools. Too bad Obama and Duncan seem to believe in the magic. I’m grateful to Caleb Rossiter for being a brave whistle-blower.
And you know what they do to whistleblowers. If this dedicated teacher didn’t resign, they would have fired him. This happens all the time. Pressure on teachers to improve grades students have not earned. Many teachers do it out of fear but this is the worst thing to do as a professional. In California as in many states, social promotion makes it difficult to move students to advanced levels when they haven’t grasped the basics. Unfortunately, this move to digital testing will not improve or solve this situation. Teachers, we are under duress from all sides.
Here’s the meaning of the word, CHARTER from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/charter
Guess CHARTER schools have SPECIAL PRIVILEGE and IMMUNITY.
char·ter (chärtr)
n.
1. A document issued by a sovereign, legislature, or other authority, creating a public or private corporation, such as a city, college, or bank, and defining its privileges and purposes.
2. A written grant from the sovereign power of a country conferring certain rights and privileges on a person, a corporation, or the people: A royal charter exempted the Massachusetts colony from direct interference by the Crown.
3. A document outlining the principles, functions, and organization of a corporate body; a constitution: the city charter.
4. An authorization from a central organization to establish a local branch or chapter.
5. Special privilege or immunity.
This letter of resignation reminds us that schoolteachers have a great deal more power than they acknowledge or exercise. If teachers who are about to retire would just tell what they know, that would go a long way in educating the public about the rampant fraud that is taking place at the present time.
Yes, it is true that a teacher who needs the job doesn’t dare blow the whistle, but I know from experience that there are some teachers (about to retire, don’t need the job) who can do it. But teachers are basically nice people who don’t want to cause trouble.
Thank you to this brave teacher. Best of luck to him in his future job pursuits.
This posting gives added meaning to the now-incomplete phrase “figures don’t lie but liars figure.”
What happens when edufrauds need to massage and torture the numbers in order to meet the expectations required to maintain the fiction of high “achievement” and “progress” and “performance”?
A toxic mix well described by Andrew Lang:
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.”
But never fear—the children may get left behind, but the adults in charge of those Centres of EduExcellence will be basking in $tudent $ucce$$.
😡
Linda J:
Seems as though teachers aren’t the only ones afraid of losing their jobs. When you have governors, superintendents, principals, union leaders, (middle men/women), not sticking up for teachers and students, I can see how cowardly they are as well of keeping their high-paying positions. But their philosophy is that teachers are dispensible and they come a dime a dozen what’s to worry.
Our state is required to open charter schools based on voters response. However, the public was not fully informed what that meant. These underpaid guinea pigs stood outside low-income area grocery stores to have a petiition signing “party” to get it on the ballot, asking people to help open charter schools. The petitioners themselves had no understanding what this would mean. They just needed extra cash. I am afraid we always react when it’s too late in this country.
However, we fought hard to win independence from British as we are doing now in education against corporations and government figures. With all due respect, Reign of Error is the new verson of the book of Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Independence Day here we come.
While I despise the manipulated and massaged claims of charter “success”, neither do I particularly support the attitude toward teaching shown in Caleb’s letter. Yes, if he failed to teach them, he must be allowed to say so. And then what? There’s a stream of unwarranted hopelessness and negativity flowing forth in the comments.
I would need to know more about his own efforts to teach his students math, before I labeled him a “dedicated teacher”. They didn’t do his homework, so what did he do in class with them to address that problem?
What background and training did the teachers have, to support them in actually reaching their students? What expectations did the STUDENTS have of their teachers? how could a community reverse the hopelessness implicit in the dishonesty of the institution?
The trap is that successful teaching in adverse circumstances won’t yield the test scores, but we can and must reach and teach America’s children.
This is classic charter school bs. Teachers are pressured to teach high level subjects that the students have no business taking. The teacher will be blamed when the students are failing. The students are failing because they enter high school performing at an elementary level. I can’t blame him for resigning instead of perpetuating a sham. It is a shame that you doubt the teacher’s dedication to his work. When students are in a classroom where they are being forced to try to learn information far above their achievement level the teacher will turn into a babysitter. Too many discipline problems will arise, etc
Why is it limited to “classic charter bs”? See my post above, plenty of public schools employ social promotion up to, and including, high school graduation. What would be interesting would be for all of the nations public high schools to conduct an exit exam on all high school graduates to determine their true education level. I’m guessing the percentage of U.S. high school graduates with something like an actual 5th-8th grade level would be enormous. Heck, Dexter Manley graduated from a public high school, played four years at Oklahoma State University, and had only a second grade reading level when he left OSU. No charter schools to blame there.
I have read and reread your post several times chemtchr, and I hope I am just misreading you, but you come off as a condescending, pompous, disconnected, know it all ass each and every time.
You state that Caleb failed to teach and so much as admitted so, offer insinuation about his “efforts”, question his dedication, imply that he mishandled the homework issue, and may even suggest that his preparation was inadequate, all with no first hand knowledge of the facts.
Perhaps, oh sage one, you might enlighten young Caleb with your brilliance? How can he adjust his attitude? How much more effort must he make? How should he whip up his charges so they want to do their homework every night? How much more preparation should he have? Please, do tell.
And for my clarification, please shed light on your judgement of the comments above yours as being “… a stream of unwarranted hopelessness and negativity…”. Are things, as Mayor Bloomberg would suggest, so much better in our poorest schools than we realize?
JonBoy – chemtchr has a point. We often read a blog and then discover there is more to the story. At my husband’s school, there is a teacher who is failing almost every student. On closer examination, there were steps she could have taken to change this situation. We don’t know exactly what happened in Caleb’s school, perhaps the administration was trying to guide him into a more pro active method of teaching.
It’s all a matter of what counts towards a grade. The goal is to have the students learn the material. Inner city schools and homework don’t mix. If you are basing half the grade on homework – you’ll get failures. Class work is a different story – if they are trying, they should get some credit. Fail the assholes who do nothing but disrupt others and focus on those who want to learn. Sometimes the teacher has to pull out all the stops to get a particular class under control. They also might need to reanalyze their strategies and even reteach.
I assume this Charter School had placed students in the class who couldn’t handle algebra. Even in suburban schools, this subject is tough. Some minds just can’t grasp the concept.
If Caleb was not getting any support – shame on the charter school. If he was misinterpreting the admin’s message – he’s in for a short career, because it’s not going to get any better somewhere else.
Not to belabor the obvious, but my previous comment about this sort of thing going on in both regular public and pseudo-public charter schools was made regardless of the particular case in this post. It doesn’t matter if people want to put this fellow under the microscope and dismiss his claims: these sorts of things most definitely are going on. And with the test-madness, “accountability” madness, data madness, and the rest of the plagues heaped upon public school teachers, students, parents, et al. by GERM (or what I would call simply “education deform”), you can bet your life that there will be cheating scandals, grading scandals, attendance scandals, and a host of other horrors directly traceable to asking public schools to transform ALL kids in poverty-ravaged inner cities into “scholars.” It’s not going to happen here on earth, and the fallout will continue to be horror stories.
Yes, Al, it sounds pomopus and condescending and know-it-all to speak up for the real values of progressive education when teachers are beaten down to the path of bemoaning and bashing their students.
I know it’s a high ground to hold onto, when corporate reformers have stolen real values and turned them into lying catch phrases. Dedicated teachers will talk about teaching, and will fight for a path forward for their students. Hundreds of thousands do.
I’ve dedicated my life to justice in education, and have paid the dues on that for 25 years and counting. Colleagues, don’t be embarassed to stand up for the children in front of you, and speak out to uphold that value.
As a graduate teacher candidate, what pressure are teachers under in rural vs. suburban vs. urban schools, along these lines.
In high performing schools, the pressure is not necessarily to pass failing students, but rather to grant grossly inflated and unearned grades. B is the new F.
A small addition to this thread.
I have written before on this blog that public schools need a whole lot of improvements too. Yet what is disturbing is how often charter schools—especially the largest, best funded and most well-known—often copy the worst practices of public schools rather than their best practices.
😎
Mrs. Chemtchr, I mean Ellen,
You have no knowledge of the facts in Caleb’s case yet you make supposition after supposition against him, just as chemtchr does. Hmmm…
Following your line of thinking, Caleb is likely an under prepared, unmotivated, rigid, disconnected young man with no business in the classroom who has the cajones, or shear stupidity, to quit his job, and fabricate some gory details, lies?, leading to his decision just to stick it to his former bosses. Yaaa….
Sorry, but most of us here see a young man of principals who refused to be an accomplice in immoral actions and walked away rather than become part of the problem.
Kudos to you Caleb!
Neither Ellen nor I wrote ANY of the nasty things you allege, JonBoy.
“Following your line of thinking … ” follows an entirely unwarranted line of drivel from inside your own head, for whatever reason.
The DC community has been under attack for a decade now, by corporate defamers. Caleb’s complaint is that the charter is failing “the majority of ninth-graders who are ready and able to work on a college preparatory curriculum when it retains in the same classrooms the significant minority who are not.” Whether he’s a dedicated teacher or not hasn’t been established yet,by his fourteen weeks of effort.
My line of thinking is that the community can and must counter the hopelessness sown by corporate “no excuses” fraud, whose real agenda is disinvestment in educational opportunity.
JonBoy – The reason I made my statement in support of chemtchr is that I don’t know all the details of Caleb’s situation. I do know a lot of promising young people who have walked away from education because of their principles (or their principals, too).
It’s a complex situation. A thin line to walk. Do you give a child a passing grade or fail them to encourage them to try harder? The teacher has a lot of discretion in determining grades. We need to ask ourselves, “What is the goal?” Obviously, we need other means of assessments besides a written test or homework. Are the teachers providing any way for those floundering students to be successful or are they just labeling them as failures?
My son had an IEP, but he was good in Math. However, the Algebra teacher gave way too much homework – over an hours worth of problems a night (even with my help). Since there were numerous problems testing the same concept, I asked the teacher if he could modify the HW so my son could actually get it done. The answer was no. My son couldn’t keep up and failed Algebra based on homework (an incomplete assignment did not get credit) even though he was capable of the work. And this was at a top high school. High standards are one thing, unrealistic expectations are another.
So, if a third or more of a class is failing, has the teacher taken a good look at what can be done to change the outcome. Failing an uncooperative student can feel good – “gotcha!”, but does it serve the greater purpose. I’m not saying to hand out As and Bs to appease the critics, I’m saying, let’s take a look at the process and see how it can be tweaked to assist more students in achieving a passing grade.
Alan is right on the money with the high performing public high schools. We are pressured to give the kids As and Bs even when they are not deserved. Those of us who teach hard electives walk a perilous path. Make it too easy and they bomb the AP test. Make it too hard and the program folds. Think about that. Don’t give enough As and Bs (even if undeserved) in an English class, parents complain, and your supervisor starts giving you bad reviews. You are pressured to “dumb it down” every day by the students, your supervisors and the parents who mostly just want their kids “to have a good time.” That is the real truth of American secondary education. Catch a kid cheating, and it is your word against the kids, with the principal intervening and going with the kid. Anything to appease the parents (consumers). It is very corrupt even at best high schools. You try to teach with rigor and morals and you can be fired or see your program disappear. This is truth! You try to do your best within above constraints.
I still can’t watch kids cheat though. I still take up their test and give them a “zero” and prepare myself for being dragged over the coals by the principal and the kids parents.
My school also decided to let the kids use cellphones in the schools. I spend a lot of time trying to get them to turn it off. Many colleagues just give up with no support and let the kids text or listen to music during class. They also don’t stop kids from cheating anymore because of what I described above. They leave it up to the students to pay attention or not just like in college. Once we get computers, then I will be talking to myself up there. That is the future of American education. Simply too many distractions, very little attention span, and teachers are stripped of power and respect. I am only talking about a top 100 American high school (national). Who knows what goes on in the bottom 24,000 schools. It must be just great.
[Nano, you may want to consider teaching in Asia or Europe]
John,
Hang on to your standards. It is disheartening to see so many roadblocks to learning entering the classroom. Students feel quite comfortable doing as they please and administrators really don’t want to be bothered. Their focus is on what teachers are doing “wrong” and all that data clogging the process. Bring back teacher autonomy!
Our issue here is the failure of a District of Columbia charter school to offer any realistic path forward for its students and teachers. A teacher in such a situation who sees himself/herself limited by the “model” of the charter operators, or by a corrupt public district, might only be able to think within that model.
The point of our movement is that there are paths forward for the children and communities we serve, and even choices we can make as teachers within this untenable moment of history. The Chicago Teachers Union has set up one model of teachers uniting with families to support the children in their care, and it is crucial not to allow bitterness and defensiveness to block that path.
I don’t think, from his letter, that Caleb Rossiter has abandoned his central commitment to teaching. His experience is limited, though, and if we call it “dedicated” already, what will we call the years of actual deep commitment needed to build the backbone for a new generation of progressive American teachers?
Xian Barret comes to mind. “Yes, I Was Fired and Still We Will Win.”
http://chiteacherx.blogspot.com/
The spectrum on two math teachers: One, in his first year teaching was assigned Algebra II, and failed almost everyone in the class the first marking period. He was talked to, but insisted that the grades accurately reflected the real knowledge of the kids of the subject. He was fired at the end of the year, not having changed his grading practices and with the headmaster adding a note to the transcript for each of those kids with a failing grade. The other teachers, also the wrestling coach, would pass his grade book around the class at the end of every marking period and told the kids to enter what they thought they had earned that marking period. After several years, people in the administration caught on, and he was fired too, not primarily because of that, however, but because he put his wrestlers on a weight loss diet of catsup and tea. Mistakes happen even at the best of private schools. There is always parental pressure to shade things up. There C meant “impossible” and B was the new D or E. The only real distinctions we had were between the A-, the A, and the A+. A select group of students, of course.
You have really hit the depths of anti-charter hater status when you are an NYU professor and you post an entire article on your blog dedicated to why one charter school teacher quit in Chicago. There are over 6,700 charters with well over 150,000 employees nationwide. But surely we should base our views on the charter system in America on the reasoning that one disgruntled employee decided to quit for….
D’oh!!!