An organization called Public Impact in North Carolina has this cool new idea–actually, not so new, because Bill Gates has been pushing it for a few years: What if school districts selected only the most excellent teachers, fired the bad teachers, and increased the class sizes of the really excellent teachers? Then the really excellent teachers could make more money, the school system would have fewer teachers and would save money. It is a win-win-win! Right?
But what if the excellent teachers are only excellent when they have 28 students in their class and stop being excellent when they have 36?
What if they have 36 students and 10 of them are English learners and 8 have disabilities? Will they still be excellent teachers if they don’t have classroom aides?
Public Impact calls this idea the “Opportunity Culture.” It is a chance to have only excellent teachers in every classroom. It is a chance to cut costs by increasing class size.
The reactionary Legislature in North Carolina loves this report.
Are you surprised that the report was subsidized by the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation, with advice from the Gates-funded Teach Plus and the Gates-funded Educators 4 Excellence. The latter two groups consist of young ex-teachers who want large classes and more money.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These “excellent” newbies will be gone in two to three years to become “leaders” to recruit new test prep drones. And from Susan Ohanian: what will we have first: driverless cars or teacherless classrooms?
And behind a politico.com paywall yesterday….just in case you still believe it’s all for the kids:
CEOs DEBATE THE ROLE OF PROFIT IN EDUCATION: Top executives from Microsoft, Pearson, Discovery Education, Intel and other firms will gather in Davos, Switzerland today for a roundtable on education during the World Economic Forum. Joined by academics from Harvard and Stanford, the group will mull the risks and benefits of making a profit motive more central to education; swap tips on connecting corporations, schools and governments; and consider how to ensure that ed tech products rise or fall based on their impact in the classroom, not just their marketing budgets.
Here’s an old post of mine
dealing with the Public Impact
video on “Opportunity Culture”
described above (it includes
a link to Edushyster’s humorous
de-construction of it):
———————————-
Brace yourself for…
“10 Minutes of Ed Reform Lunacy”
(my alternate title to this video BELOW) :
Oh
my
God…
It’s beyond bizarre… in its arguments
for raising class size, for replacing live
teachers with computers,
and with on-line instructors…
and the video’s graphics… cartoon
kids placed within specious graphs
while walking on treadmills… (its
creators not recognizing the irony
and connotations that such an
image carries with it)
the “excellence”-deprived teachers
and students are colored gray, but
who turn multi-colored
as they transform into newly-superior
beings of “excellence”…
and the super-excellent teachers
sport “stars” like in the classic Dr.
Seuss’ book “THE SNEETCHES”.
Also, you could make a drinking
game out of this: you must drink
a shot every time you hear
the words “excellent” or “excellence”
spoken.
This has got to be an ONION
parody… but it’s not.
Also, the monotone, melodious
female “voice of the future” of
the video’s narrator is like
something out of “THX 1138”
or Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, or
some other movie about a
sterile, future devoid of
compassion and individuality,
as is the inane electronic
music soundtrack.
It does serve the purpose in illustrating
what certain folks genuinely believe to
be effective “ed reform”, while
providing a good laugh in the process.
I found this video—with a hilariously
sarcastic description— on Edushyster’s
blog:
http://edushyster.com/?p=2948#more-2948
The COMMENTS continue the hilarity:
Here’s a sampling:
— “I could only watch that video for
about 2 minutes before I was nauseated
by a wave of ‘excellence’! I am sure
you have already noticed a lack of
source material, and the irony of
wanting these ‘excellent’ teachers
to teach critical thinking
to a gazillion students.
“I have no idea how one can do
both, but I guess I’m not ‘excellent’
enough.”
— “Were these ‘excellent teachers’
hatched from pods? Where did they
come from? How did they get to be
excellent teachers? The bottom line
is that teacher quality is, in great part,
dependent on the preparation
programs from which the teachers
graduated.”
— “This video had to be a big,
group project of people never in
the classroom. They broke up into
four groups to figure out a way to
teach more kids with less ‘excellent’
teachers, got back together, and
presented their ideas. I can see the
big Post-it sheets on the walls filled
with magic marker brainstorms,
arrows, underlining, oh my. End of
day, they turned it all over to the
facilitators who boiled it down into
this fantasy.
“And undoubtedly got paid
more for this one ridiculous
video than an average excellent
teacher makes in several
years. I’d retch but don’t want to
waste my excellent box wine.”
— “It’s useless to resist. If you think
‘opportunity culture’ is ridiculous
marketing language for yet another fad,
it doesn’t matter. They’re bringing this
gift to ALL schools, whether parents,
teachers and children like it or not.
It’s the oddest philanthropy I have ever
seen. It’s mandatory!”
===========
And who created this monstrosity?
Check it out at:
http://opportunityculture.org/ocat/
Here’s the usual suspects:
– – – – – – – –
“Celine Coggins, Chief Executive Officer, Teach Plus
“John Danner, Co-Founder and CEO, Rocketship Education
“Alex Hernandez, Partner and Vice President, Charter School Growth Fund
“Michael Horn, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Education, Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation
“Karen Hawley Miles, President and Executive Director, Education Resource Strategies
“Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Program Officer in Urban Education, Carnegie Corporation of New York
“Sydney Morris, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Educators 4 Excellence
“Marguerite Roza, Director, Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University and Senior Scholar, Center on Reinventing Public Education
“Ariela Rozman, Chief Executive Officer, TNTP
“Butch Trusty, Senior Program Officer for Education, The Joyce Foundation
“S. Denise Watts, Zone Superintendent and Executive Director, Project L.I.F.T./Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools
“Jeff Wetzler, Executive Vice President, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer, Teach For America”
– – – – – – – – – – –
As the COMMENT-ers put it,
— “Wow…the same suspects…TFA,
TNTP, E4E…
“Has anyone (listed here) ever taught or
stayed in the classroom for more than
two years? They are all experts at
something they don’t want to do anymore.”
— “Of course… the creators of this
video were all so committed,
passionate, inspired and all-around
‘excellent’ at teaching that …
They… Stopped… Doing… It.”
As a band director…but that’s a whole other set of issues. I certainly don’t want 40 or 50 kids in a general music class. For one, there’s hardly any time for individual attention. And if you are having children play instruments, you have to correct individual errors. And in the beginning band class, you are almost a private instructor.
Another phrase that pops up in
this specious video monstrosity is
“within budget”… or words to that
effect.
This is all about doing education
on the cheap…. for the middle
and working classes, that is…
NOT for the oligarchs, though…
you know the same ones who
will profit from “Opportunity
Culture” once all or most schools
have been privatized… THEY
WOULD NEVER TOLERATE
THIS “Opportunity Culture”
GARBAGE FOR THEIR
OWN CHILDREN.
However, do you think Obama
or NYC Ed. Commissioner King
or Bill Gates, or Rahm Emanuel
would be happy that their own
kids’ schools were employing
“time technology swaps”?
According to the video,
this is where “students learn the
basics through digital instruction”…
which is code for…
“kids get stuck sitting alone in a
walled computer cubicle with
headphones on for hours on
end instead of being taught by a
live teacher in the room …”
The reaction of Obama, Gates, King,
Emanuel would be, “Whoa, whoa…
wait a sec… let me get this straight:
I’m shelling out $30,000 / a year per
kid, and all this school dies is
stick my kids in front of a computer
all day, or for most of the day? I
could have had them stay at home
and do that for free?”
EXACTLY!
I have to cut-‘n-pate Edushyster’s analysis of the video and post it here, as Edushyster says it more humorously and better than I:
http://edushyster.com/?p=2948#more-2948
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
EDUSHYSTER:
“If we just make sure that every student in America has an ‘excellent’ teacher, they will all be on the super-fast treadmills. But how can we implement this easy solution, especially since our educational arteries are clogged with so many non-excellent teachers, not to mention the ‘good, solid’ teachers whom we only realized were part of the problem when we watched this video???
“Easy peasy, reader: you use a combination of old favorites like larger class sizes with new-fangled approaches like ‘time technology swaps’ best practice ‘pods’ and ‘accountable remote teachers’ so that the excellent teacher can stretch the outer-most boundaries of excellence.
“Now with more ‘excellence’!
“But surely all of this excellence must come with a pretty steep price tag, right? That’s where the good news gets even better, reader. You see the old days of paying ‘good, solid’ teachers ‘good, solid’ wages have now ended and we are in a cool new ‘Opportunity Culture.’
“Which means that it’s now possible to give our most ‘excellent’ teachers a most ‘excellent’ pay increase while continuing to spend the exact same amount of money we used to spend, only with (the current) non-excellent results.
“Now as someone who was unfortunate enough to have had only ‘good, solid’ teachers at union-stifled public schools, my brain is officially starting to throb, —but I’m pretty sure that in order to pay a few people substantially more, everyone else is going to have to earn less. Of course, you don’t make an ‘excellence omelette’ without breaking a whole lot of eggs.
“The Lake Wobegon Effect –
“Alas, that is the price we must all be prepared to pay in order to overcome the ‘excellence’ deficit that has for so long caused our children to fall from their ladders of opportunity, landing upon their slow moving treadmills.
“And to all of you haters who insist on dwelling upon an inconvenient statistical concept called the median, which separates the higher half of a data sample from the lower half, pack up your excuse packs and head on home. There is no median at the ‘Lake Wobegon Academy of Excellence and Innovation.’ All of the students here are excellent.”
Let Sidwell Friends try out this theory first.
the larger the class, the less the involvement of individual students in whole class discussions, and the harder for the teacher to give individual help and to give appropriae feedback on writing.
Oh, and it is not just class size, it is also total load. Heck, If I had one 3 hour class of 40 students that would be better than 4 45 minute classes of 25 students each – 2.5 times the load of student papers for the same time taught.
As it is, my current classes range from 7 in a specialized project-based learning to 29 in an AP US Government and politics class. This compares with a time when I hads up to 36 in an 18 x 30 foot temporary building.
Yes, I can keep the attention of most of the students in a large class, but I cannot give them the individual attention to which they should be entitled, nor can I get to know them as well.
Teaching is not just lecturing.
Well, Ken, the former PGCPS Board chair told parents at Woodmore Elementary School (30 in K, 33 in 3rd, 32 in 5th) that studies show that it is better for kids to have a great teacher with whatever class size than it is to have small classes with a good teacher.
She finally got back to me when I asked for the studies but she did not provide the studies.
I intend to ask her if she will push a policy that gives new teachers small classes until they show they are great. Then when they show they are great they will get a bigger class.
🙂
curious as to which former chair – Donna Hathaway Beck, per chance? I retired from PGCPS at end of 11-12 school year, and am now in Anne Arundel. That sounds like repetition of some of blathering from Bill Gates. It is also a false dichotomy. It is best for children to be in smaller classes with great teachers, which is why wealthy people pay so much to send their kids to elite private schools that advertise their small class size – if they have to advertise at all.
Ken, it was Verjeana Jacobs who made those remarks. Ms Hathaway-Beck has resigned her position, in part due to personal reasons but mainly due to the curtailed responsibilities of the BOE members. CE Rushern Baker may not have total control, but the majority of the school board are now his people.
10 months ago the Post ran some articles drumming up justification for CE Baker to have total control of the schools (like Fenty & Gray in DC). One article featured a Democrat party leader/main member who decided to put his child in a private school, despite being a leader, a PGCPS grad and his mother having been a PGCPS employee.
He cited two things about Holy Trinity Day Episcopal Day School (Bowie, MD) that he and his wife liked:
-17 students in his daughter’s First grade class
-weekly art classes
His child would have attended Glen Dale ES, where she would not have weekly art classes (the art teacher comes into the school for about 3 weeks a quarter) and there would have been 27 in the class.
I understand his decision.
So, will us “teachers in the trenches” be taking our private jets to a destination forum to discuss how much money it will take to make us those excellent teachers of 40 diverse learners???? Big money is buying the policy and who cares about kids.
Arne may claim Gates does not have a “seat at the table”, in reality Gates owns the house.
Pathological….
From my perspective as a teacher, I have often visualized teaching (I’m thinking high school but maybe it works with the little ones too) as that acrobat who keeps plates (students) spinning on sticks (learning). Each spinning plate-student needs attention to keep them spinning-learning. Those teacher-acrobats who are good at it might be able to keep a few more student-plates spinning-learning but each student-plate gets less attention than it would if there were fewer and spins-learns less smoothly-efficiently. At some critical point the number will exceed the acrobat-teacher’s ability to keep them all spinning-learning appropriately and the entire operation will crash to the floor. The chaos and noise that will result will be predictable, but hey, think of the money that was saved! What is the effect on the plate-students? Do they really care that they are lying broken on the floor?
For the record, each student-plate is unique – one of a kind and irreplaceable ; requires different amounts and types of effort to keep them spinning; and is the most valuable and precious family heir loom that their family can entrust the acrobat-teacher to care for.
Who will sweep up the pieces?
Of course, the “best teachers” will be defined solely by test scores, so there will be a constantly rotating cast of “best teachers”. With any luck, you could be excellent one year and fired the next.
I am really tired of reading these “ideas” that these people are coming up with to solve our education problems. Do they really have a clue of what goes on in a classroom?Something tells me they don’t. I wish they would take time out of their busy schedules and travels to visit classrooms across the state. These visits need to last more than an hour…they need be there for a period of time so they can truly see what happens day to day. These visits, if taken, would hopefully help them get a better understanding of what is happening in our schools. Maybe then they will realize their solutions/ideas are not the answers.
I guess the same is true for parents. “Great parents” should have lots of kids. I’m sure it will work.
Good point.
This is the seed of a revolutionary idea to improve the public schools. Unfortunately the folks at Public Impact had some trouble thinking out of the box. All they had to do was extrapolate the concept into a format that ensures college readiness: converting the high school auditorium and gymnasium into student lecture halls. By example, the most excellent math teacher would teach every 9th grade algebra student on Mondays during a morning lecture hall session in the auditorium lasting 3 hours/20 min. That same excellent math teacher teaches geometry on Tuesdays (all 10th graders), Trig on Wednesdays to all juniors, and Calculus on Thursdays. The one most excellent English teacher does the same in the afternoon session. Top Science and SS teachers use the auditorium. Khan Academy can be used to flip the lecture hall. Since teachers are 0.8 employees on could negotiate away their benefits too. This should work in any high school with cohorts of 1,000 students or fewer. All students get taught by the four best core teachers and scores should skyrocket!
OOPS> science and SS must obviously use the gymnasium.
In my career I’ve been fortunate to have teaching experience in China and the U.S. The average number of students in my classes (in non-private Chinese schools) was 70-80 students. Let me repeat – that’s per classroom, not per grade level. This was consistent in K-12 and university. I know what “super-sized” classes look like. At the time, factoring in the conversion from yuan to dollars, my compensation was about the same as U.S. teacher pay. I’m an over-achiever, determined to actually educate in even the most extreme circumstances, so I relied a lot on cooperative learning methods. An obvious choice, but requiring many, many hours of pre-planning. My point is, how much more effective would my time have been if I could have redirected all those planning hours into more direct student contact across more classes containing smaller number of students? I’ve lived super-sized classes. They are not for the faint of heart, and I know they do not allow me to address (much less identify) the specialized learning needs of students. In the “Opportunity Culture” model, I doubt many teachers will make more money in the long-run, but students will most certainly be short-changed.
Maybe they should have hired a more “excellent” writer. They used the word “excellent” 32 times in a 3 page report. It sounded like it was written by a robot.
As a former NYC teacher who routinely had more than 30 in a class, I could do it in the blink of an eye, if I could control my classroom. I would use portfolio assessment and many cooperative learning activities with groups. Unfortunately, the system is so messed up that teaching to any amount of children can be hazardous to their mental health and everyone would have a good time.
Require all state superintendents to spend a full week in the hardest to teach school teaching any subject they are qualified to teach. Of course, give them a week of preparation and advice from master teachers. Make them see both the wonders of teaching and the insanity of notes from the principal for their files for forgetting to sign in or not having the requisite number of minutes to do out-loud reading, or other nonsense like that.
If they’re not qualified to teach, fire them immediately from their lofty position.
Two thoughts:
“When excellent teachers reach more students successfully, schools may be able to reduce the number of non-classroom in- structional specialists who provide remedial and advanced instruc- tion, freeing funds that might be used to pay excellent teachers more. Some non-classroom instructional specialists may be candi- dates for reach-extended teaching roles.”
This suggests that the members of Teach Plus, Educators4Excellence, and the Opportunity Culture Advisory Team have spent some time in Colorado recently . . .
“This publication was made possible in part by support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and The Joyce Foundation.”
But it’s OK because Arne has assured us that they are not at the table . . .
The only way that it is excellent to have lots of kids in a class is if it is a band or orchestra class. Remember those? Give me 50 string players! Other than that…no. It is always suspicious when people talk about “excellent” teachers because the rating system is unclear. Is an excellent teacher one who is remembered? One who turns kids around if they are lacking direction? Or is it all about test scores?
Teachers would make a lot more money if school districts would stop wasting money on consultants and tests.
” The latter two groups consist of young ex-teachers who want large classes and more money.”
Rewrite:
The latter two groups consist of young ex-teachers who want more money and want the suckers who stay in the classroom to have large classes.
Watch this video by a 6th grader who knows class size does impact her learning. Parents, students and teachers would all say smaller is better. People who say the opposite are concerned about $$ not about kids.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6WVS9GTkYo&feature=youtube_gdata_player&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Du6WVS9GTkYo%26feature%3Dyoutube_gdata_player#
Here is another great link: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/04/accountability_for_mr_gates_th.html “Recommendation for Professional Growth:
We recommend Mr. Gates take a year off from his work as a philanthropist, and work as a high school instructor in an urban setting. His students should include English learners, students who are homeless, and those designated as Special Education. He should work alongside a fully credentialed professional educator, who will provide him with feedback, and reflect with him as he gains an understanding of how we create effective learning conditions for students.”
Terrible idea. Larger class sizes, even for an excellent teacher, means less interaction to get to know individual students’, fewer authentic assessments due to grading time, and less timely feedback for students and parents. In addition, students with special needs or behavior problems will not receive the attention they need. Also, there’s less opportunity for all students to be able to participate in class discussions when class sizes become too large, and sometimes the physical space of the room makes grouping students and re-arranging desks extremely difficult or impossible. All in all, learning decreases when class size increases. (I speak from experience!).
I, personally, went through exactly what they are talking about doing in the 1970s. I don’t know what it was called, maybe open schooling but my 5th grade in Palatine, Illinois had 52 students, 1 teacher and 2 aides. I didn’t learn anything in math all year (I hated math and went to the nurse almost every day…no one noticed because there were FIFTY TWO OF US). So in 6th grade I had to go back to my 5th grade teacher during recess (probably her lunch) and learn to divide . My mother has always called it my wasted year. The next year wasn’t much better because they really took the open concept a step further and let us direct our own learning…study what you want, make your own schedule…I was 11 years old, what did I know about making a schedule and sticking to it, I couldn’t even divide. Every time my mother came into the school, she found me under a table reading (I LOVED reading) but I really didn’t do much else, certainly not MATH.
Sure it was a “wasted year”, but that was because those teachers weren’t “excellent” enough. OPPORTUNITY CULTURE will make sure that won’t happen.
What do I, a NC public school teacher, think? I think it’s time to relocate. I chose to settle in NC b/c of its strong support for public education, but that’s now a thing of the past. The state govt is hell-bent on destroying both the teaching profession and the public schools.
As soon as I am able, I will join the exodus of good, experienced teachers to anywhere but here…
I think this has little to do with class size or education at all and a great deal to do with some people’s pathetic and pathological need for power over others. All others. I think people like Gates and those who admire Gates or are employed to insidiously enact his will (E4E, among many others) are the greatest threat to our dying democracy that we now face. I think that if we do not awaken as a nation we are headed for decades of technologically induced darkness the likes of which the world has never seen.
Hmm Arne claims Bill doesn’t have a seat at the table? Seems he continues to allow him a seat, and in fact pulls up the chair for him, pushes it in, and gets him a glass of water. WHY IS GATES ABLE TO WEIGH IN ON ANY EDUCATION POLICIES IN THIS COUNTRY!! I know $$$$. It’s all about the $ not about kids, education, or teachers.
I wonder how Gates would react if a small group of English teachers wrote a new operating system and used their political influence to force Micro-soft to use it.
Tech might want to work on their own “opportunity culture” rather than “reinventing” education.
According to this class action suit, tech titans and their rubber-stamp boards of directors colluded to drive down wages among their own employees by making secret deals to limit employees ability to move between companies. Apparently they’re not familiar with the word “cartel”:
http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/?utm_source=PandoDigest&utm_campaign=ca12eb806b-PandoDigest_December_9_2013_copy_09_12_11_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2f01c2729e-ca12eb806b-81030549
Interesting.
It’s an extension of the ed reform idea of “backpack vouchers”, just applied within a school.
Rather than picturing each child unit with a per pupil number attached within a community, picture each child unit with a per pupil number attached within a school.
Teachers would then compete for number of units produced, with the teachers who turn out more units paid better.
If they get rid of the “time” element they’ll have come full circle and this won’t be new or innovative at all. It will be what used to be called “piecework” 🙂
I look forward to the next iteration of this idea, where it goes from 21st century to 19th century.
Nothing new under the sun, when your goal is to cut costs 🙂
Who are these people who are coming up with this stuff? How about this…why don’t we send these folks to our most rural and most urban districts and let them “show us how it’s done” since they are so “excellent” in their theories? They must work 5 years (if they make it that long ) then we will look at those numbers and track their students to see where they are. Sound good? Oh wait…we can’t and shouldn’t do that because it would be unethical to torture and neglect a student’s right to a quality education.
What I would like to know is why NEA has partnered with Teach Plus????? Even though I have been a union member for over 35 years, NEA is too closely tied in with Bill Gates. NEA can not help our cause when they are in bed with the perpetrators!
The most effective teachers are those who nurture a relationships with their students, who *need* to know the teacher cares them *personally*. That personal touch diminishes with class sizes of 25 and over. With 35, and a 5 class schedule, it’s not possible.
The very idea that a teacher can be effective with these numbers discounts the only factor that is critical for a successful classroom: humanity.
going to slightly disagree with Michael. I used to teach 6 classes, with an average of 30 students. That’s 180, or more than 5 x 35 which is 175. I was able to develop and maintain personal relationships. But it took a major time commitment. It helped that I did not have children of my own, that I had only 2 preps most of the time (occasionally 3), that I read over 1000 wpm (helpful in correcting papers) and that I lived on 5 hours sleep a night. I agree that the total student load was not good, but also that it was not impossible, if you did not mind the commitment, to develop and keep the relationships that are so important.
Kyle Maynard climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro without arms or legs. Lots of insanely, super-human feats have been accomplished. This doesn’t mean these accomplishments should become models for sustainable policy. Not sure what your point is?
there is a difference between impossible and unreasonable/unrealistic. I responded to a comment that said it was impossible, which I know it is not. We need to be precise in our arguments
You are right. Great teachers can kill themselves working around the clock. I know many that do. How long is that sustainable? What pay compensates fairly for that amount of work and responsibility?
A precise argument that lacks common sense does us no good.
I wish my teacher load was that low. I have 256 students in US History, Geography, AP Human Geography and Debate. I also coach the debate team, getting 350 dollars extra pay for 150 hours out of school coaching. I teach 9 periods (we have a block schedule of 10 classes, 5 every day and rotating every other day). Probably 30 of those students have IEPs and 50 or so are ELL. I try to have personal relationships, but I know that kids are falling through the cracks. I don’t know what else to do and I’m exhausted all the time. This is Utah, where the class sizes that I have (usually 36) are routine, even for honors and advanced classes. ELL and special education classes are often at 20 or 25.
Young, dedicated, idealistic teachers will take those hopeless jobs and get abused and kicked, told they’re not “excellent” enough after two years and quit or get fired. They will be soured on education for a lifetime and when they are parents will probably stay far away from their children’s school in order not to have to relive their traumatic memories. And what of their students?
I think it is ridiculous in every way! It will only end up hurting students in the long run for countless reasons. I don’t understand how people like Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, etc.. can sleep at night. Why can’t they get it through their thick skulls, that when you educate children you are in the “people business” which is completely different, than the kind of corporate business model which runs for profit. They thoroughly disgust me! I would admire them if they could just admit that they are NOT educators and that their practices and philosophies for educating America’s K-12 children were WRONG and then they “get out of it”!!!!!
They sleep at night because they are arrogant and have no checks on their power. Do you think Arne Duncan experiences the slightest stress in his job? He doesn’t have to worry about losing his current job. He also knows that he will be able to cash in with Gates and Broad after his time in office. Really disgusting
Here’s an old post of mine
dealing with the Public Impact
video on “Opportunity Culture”
described above (it includes
a link to Edushyster’s humorous
de-construction of it):
———————————-
Brace yourself for…
“10 Minutes of Ed Reform Lunacy”
(my alternate title to this video BELOW) :
Oh
my
God…
It’s beyond bizarre… in its arguments
for raising class size, for replacing live
teachers with computers,
and with on-line instructors…
and the video’s graphics… cartoon
kids placed within specious graphs
while walking on treadmills… (its
creators not recognizing the irony
and connotations that such an
image carries with it)
the “excellence”-deprived teachers
and students are colored gray, but
who turn multi-colored
as they transform into newly-superior
beings of “excellence”…
and the super-excellent teachers
sport “stars” like in the classic Dr.
Seuss’ book “THE SNEETCHES”.
Also, you could make a drinking
game out of this: you must drink
a shot every time you hear
the words “excellent” or “excellence”
spoken.
This has got to be an ONION
parody… but it’s not.
Also, the monotone, melodious
female “voice of the future” of
the video’s narrator is like
something out of “THX 1138″
or Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, or
some other movie about a
sterile, future devoid of
compassion and individuality,
as is the inane electronic
music soundtrack.
It does serve the purpose in illustrating
what certain folks genuinely believe to
be effective “ed reform”, while
providing a good laugh in the process.
I found this video—with a hilariously
sarcastic description— on Edushyster’s
blog:
http://edushyster.com/?p=2948#more-2948
The COMMENTS continue the hilarity:
Here’s a sampling:
— “I could only watch that video for
about 2 minutes before I was nauseated
by a wave of ‘excellence’! I am sure
you have already noticed a lack of
source material, and the irony of
wanting these ‘excellent’ teachers
to teach critical thinking
to a gazillion students.
“I have no idea how one can do
both, but I guess I’m not ‘excellent’
enough.”
— “Were these ‘excellent teachers’
hatched from pods? Where did they
come from? How did they get to be
excellent teachers? The bottom line
is that teacher quality is, in great part,
dependent on the preparation
programs from which the teachers
graduated.”
— “This video had to be a big,
group project of people never in
the classroom. They broke up into
four groups to figure out a way to
teach more kids with less ‘excellent’
teachers, got back together, and
presented their ideas. I can see the
big Post-it sheets on the walls filled
with magic marker brainstorms,
arrows, underlining, oh my. End of
day, they turned it all over to the
facilitators who boiled it down into
this fantasy.
“And undoubtedly got paid
more for this one ridiculous
video than an average excellent
teacher makes in several
years. I’d retch but don’t want to
waste my excellent box wine.”
— “It’s useless to resist. If you think
‘opportunity culture’ is ridiculous
marketing language for yet another fad,
it doesn’t matter. They’re bringing this
gift to ALL schools, whether parents,
teachers and children like it or not.
It’s the oddest philanthropy I have ever
seen. It’s mandatory!”
===========
And who created this monstrosity?
Check it out at:
http://opportunityculture.org/ocat/
Here’s the usual suspects:
– – – – – – – –
“Celine Coggins, Chief Executive Officer, Teach Plus
“John Danner, Co-Founder and CEO, Rocketship Education
“Alex Hernandez, Partner and Vice President, Charter School Growth Fund
“Michael Horn, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Education, Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation
“Karen Hawley Miles, President and Executive Director, Education Resource Strategies
“Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Program Officer in Urban Education, Carnegie Corporation of New York
“Sydney Morris, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Educators 4 Excellence
“Marguerite Roza, Director, Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University and Senior Scholar, Center on Reinventing Public Education
“Ariela Rozman, Chief Executive Officer, TNTP
“Butch Trusty, Senior Program Officer for Education, The Joyce Foundation
“S. Denise Watts, Zone Superintendent and Executive Director, Project L.I.F.T./Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools
“Jeff Wetzler, Executive Vice President, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer, Teach For America”
– – – – – – – – – – –
As the COMMENT-ers put it,
— “Wow…the same suspects…TFA,
TNTP, E4E…
“Has anyone (listed here) ever taught or
stayed in the classroom for more than
two years? They are all experts at
something they don’t want to do anymore.”
— “Of course… the creators of this
video were all so committed,
passionate, inspired and all-around
‘excellent’ at teaching that …
They… Stopped… Doing… It.”
Oh, yeah. And the parents wonder what is happening to their child.
Isn’t this whole thing sort of silly? Class sizes have gone up anyway in ed reform states like mine because ed reformers slash education budgets. My district has lost millions, and ed reformers have added ridiculous, expensive ever-changing mandates along with the cuts.
Now that they’ve increased class sizes they produce a plan for a big PR push that increased class sizes are actually about “quality”?
It’s just nonsense. They’ve already increased class sizes. Had absolutely nothing to do with “quality”. Why bother with these studies? They’ve already attained the goal, which was to cut taxes and starve public schools. Dressing it up after the fact as about “quality” is insulting. You’d think they’d have the decency to take the big win they got on reducing taxes and public school funding and go home.
Because excellent teachers care about money rather than, say, being able to provide more attention to a student.
I wish Bill Gates could sub for me one day.
I expect that these “reformers” wouldn’t last a day. It would make great You-Tube fodder, though.
Here is a teaser Public Impact has on their website.
“Try, Try Again
Triple Your Turnaround Success Rate… Without Getting Better at Turning Around Schools.”
Everybody who has actually been inside a classroom, as a classroom teacher, for more than 5 minutes knows that as the number of students in your classes rises, actual learning decreases. The reason is logical (well for some of us) as class size increases, teachers become more and more classroom MANAGERS, not educators. You cram 30 plus Teenagers or 3rd graders into a one room for an extended amount of time and behavior issues inevitably begin to occur. The teacher teaches less, manages behavior more, and has less time to devote to the students who actually are trying to learn and who are becoming frustrated because the teacher has to stop teaching and deal with behavior issues. .
“Opportunity Culture” is just another corporate, “reformy” word for destroying public education, limiting freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, increasing income disparity and weakening the middle class.
No thread about class size hypocrisy among wealthy edu-prenuers would be complete without SEATTLE TIMES’ Danny Weastneat’s classic column covered here on Dr. Ravitch’s blog:
https://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/12/seattle-writer-challenges-bill-gates-to-be-consistent/
———————————————–
“Seattle Writer Challenges Bill Gates to Be Consistent
“A reader sent the following observation:
“Here’s a devastating article that points up Bill Gates’ hypocrisy when it comes to the variation between what he demands for his own children, and what he subjects children from lower income communities:
“THE SEATTLE TIMES’ Danny Westneat takes Gates to task for promoting policy all over the country that jacks class size sky high, with Gates using the common-sense-defying logic that kids will fare better in larger classes.
“Well, Westneat sends his own kids to public schools, and will eventually attend Garfield High School (in the news of late). These are the schools that—once Gates has his way—will have obscenely large class sizes… A bit fed up, Weastneat did what perhaps no other writer has yet dared to do:
http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny09.html
“He investigated the two rich kids’ private school where Gates sends his own children and—doncha know it? —these schools major selling point is that they have… wait for it… EXTREMELY SMALL CLASS SIZES:
WESTNEAT: “I bet (Gates) senses deep down as a parent that pushing more kids into classes isn’t what’s best for students. His kids’ private-sector grade school has 17 kids in each room. His daughter’s high school has 15. These intimate settings are the selling point, the chief reason tuition is $25,000 a year — more than double what Seattle schools spends per student.”
“Calling out Gates’ hypocrisy, Weastneat ends the article with a knockout finish:
WEASTNEAT: “Bill, here’s an experiment. You and I both have an 8-year-old. Let’s take your school and double its class sizes, from 16 to 32. We’ll use the extra money generated by that — a whopping $400,000 more per year per classroom — to halve the class sizes, from 32 to 16, at my public high school, Garfield.
“In 2020, when our kids are graduating, we’ll compare what effect it all had. On student achievement. On teaching quality. On morale. Or that best thing of all, the “environment that promotes relationships between teachers and students.”
“Deal? Probably not. Nobody would take that trade. Which says more than all the studies ever will.”
THANK YOU, JACK! That’s what I’ve been saying all along. If you REALLY want to know what a man is, you walk in his shoes! If Bill Gates, et al., really believed in the happy horse manure they’re shoveling for public consumption, why, they’d use it themselves. Since they don’t, I have to believe they’re hypocrites.
Welcome to the Los Angeles Unified School District – try 45 kids in a middle school or high school classroom. Try cutting WAY back on custodial services and then adding janitorial work as part of a teacher’s evaluation. It’s called creating a physically safe learning environment. Try eliminating Deans and security staff. Then try preaching about “classroom management” at each “professional development” Tuesday session. Hey, in many ways the “liberals” of Southern California have the North Carolina “experts” beat when it comes to teacher blame.
Evaluation is easy when it really just boils down to whether an administrator likes a teacher or not. Good teachers smile and say, “yes.” Bad teachers criticize. But the glory of LAUSD is that you don’t need a prolonged process of evaluation to dispose of “bad” teachers. You solicit middle school girls to say the teacher touched them inappropriately and you whisk the “bad” teachers off to teacher jail. It doesn’t matter whether police or family members or other faculty members have exonerated the accused. “Bad” teachers sit in teacher jail for months until the board eventually fires them by a majority vote.
Funny how the district recently announced that they were going to hire 1,000 new teachers. How did they find these vacancies?
I can attest to every word you say. I just recently “graduated” from teacher jail via retirement (of course I had already put into my papers before I was banished). Some way to end a career.
I have taught large classes ever since I became a teacher. I teach art. Here in Florida art teachers don’t matter as much. I have taugh up to 50 students in one class. I can not think of a good reason to cram fifty seventh graders in one room.
I have a class of 40+ students this year and most of my classes are above 30. I have one class in the high 20. I teach six periods and don’t have a planning period, I need the extra period because we don’t get paid very well. My class in the high 20 feels like a small class compared to the one of 40+. Feels like a discussion group. I have time to sit with students and discuss their ideas and thoughts about the work they are doing.
My class of 40+ feels like an assembly line. I have to run it like a general.
I do not recommend it.
I was a terrific teacher when I had only 35-40 students in my PE classes. I taught Fencing, Fly Fishing, skiing, Plyometrics and a host of other new and exciting and valuable activities. I actually took a busload of kids to the Kings River to fish and our department took kids to a ski facility to ski (and most to see snow for the first time, ever). With 50 or 55 or 60 kids (I once had 72 and my wife once had 80 in a class) you can’t do that. We taught in a very tough neighborhood, crime, drugs, gangs, low socio-economics and we managed not only to turn the school around, but made a profound difference in the educational culture of the entire neighborhood. Anyone who says they like large classes is either incompetent of stupid. Anyone who promotes large class sizes should be condemned to to teaching extra large classes for ALL OF ETERNITY.
Joseph H
EXCELLENT POINT and a GREAT EXAMPLE.
Probably the least talked about yet most important aspect of class size involves the quality of the activities we can implement. The logistical limitations imposed by large class size will inevitably diminish the quality of the learning experience. Its the difference between crowd control and true teaching.
What a marvelous idea. And while we are at it let’s let nurses who are excellent stay and those who are still learning go. Yep, Instead of taking care of 10 patients at a time take care of 20 and get paid twice as much. And surgeons, yep instead of operating on 5 people a day how about 10 or 15 and we can pay you twice or three times as much. And lawyers who defend the public,,well they already have more cases than they can handle just like teachers have more students than they can handle. It’s not a factory Bill Gates and teachers, aren’t robot zombies, they need sleep, rest, and down time, especially when dealing with so many kids and grading their papers, and preparing lessons having conferences, where’s the time and energy going to come from oh great ones who think they know all about school reform? Being good can’t be supersized like Macdonalds hambergers and fries.
This is the kind of Modest Proposal (see Jonathan Swift) that we need more of! Really calls the Bull for what it is! Great job.
This is why you don’t give control of a policy to the highest bidder.
I teach second grade at a Title I school. I just got 2 new students, one with very low skills, the other with ADHD, very low skills. Second student: we are his 4th school this year. I also have a student who just returned after 10 days of mostly unexcused absences (she’s missed 23 days this year). They each need a lot of extra help to catch up, or even just make progress from where they are. Then there are the kids I’ve had all along who need extra help with concepts. Sometimes even 24 students is too many.
Bill Gates on class size at his alma mater, Lakeside where class size was 16 : “Finally, I had great relationships with my teachers here at Lakeside. Classes were small. You got to know the teachers. They got to know you. And the relationships that come from that really make a difference…”. http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/ Apparently, small class size only mattered for him
For him and for his children!
This is a joke right???? And a crappy one at that.
This is the same idea as sticking your infant in front of a TV all day.
Instead of giving excellent teachers MORE students, how about giving them fewer, and allowing them to work with and mentor other teachers for a couple of periods a day?
Only once in 25 years in the classroom did I have an administrator who had the boldness and imagination to release me for one class period a day to work with other teachers. The results were magical for them, me, the students; an entire re-invigoration of the education process for all of us.
Naturally, the initiative was cancelled for lack of funds, and the horror of having somebody doing something different.
How come Bill Gates thinks that good teachers are gosh darn super-magical for children but utterly powerless to help, say, other teachers? It’s as if he and others have contempt for the idea of education happening in schools.
As an Ex$cellent Educator for Ex$ellence, not only will I accept 50 more students in order to receive a salary increase – I’ve been working without a contract for almost five years, during which time my so-called union leadership has accepted and continues to tout RttT, VAM, APPR and Danielson – but to improve my productivity, I promise to speak twice as fast and utter 100% more words per class.
One has to wonder what will happen when the class sizes become unmanageable and test scores come down. Will that be the teacher’s fault? Will the teacher no longer be an excellent teacher?
Why do we keeping pointing to research? Why do we keep pointing to our experience? In every single case where someone is a proponent of large class size, go for their jugular, I.e., WHERE DO YOU CHILDREN ATTEND SCHOOL, AND HOW MANY CLASSMATES DO THEY HAVE? Where I come from, goose juice is gander juice, damn it!
When Dr William Hite, School District of Philadelphia and Broad Foundation creature, was asked where his children attend school, his response was a curt, dismissive, “none of your business.” While I am certain he truly believes it’s not our business, I’m also quite certain that he wouldn’t want us to know what the conditions and class sizes are, either. If that’s not food for thought, I don’t know what is!
Kate SL,
On the subject of hypocrisy of the wealthy edu-prenuers, check out these classics BELOW.
EXAMPLE # 1)
Union-buster and bridge-closer, N.J. Governor, Chris Christie, has defunded the New Jersey public schools of billions of dollars as part of a plan to sabotage them, and eventually privatize them.
Given that, Christie was asked the question that you, Katie SL, wanted asked of him:
“When you send your kids to private schools, why do you think it’s fair to be cutting funding for public schools?” (the woman asking the question send her own kids to public schools)
Here’s classic Christie response:
———————————————————-
EXAMPLE # 2)
Next, another union-buster, and privatizer, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, did the same thing when a reporter asked him the same question:
Chicago TV interviewer Mary Ann Ahern asked Rahm about where he sends his kids. He dodged the question, and then, when the cameras were off, ripped into her for asking it.
Nice.
Here’s Ms. Ahern’s account:
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/When-Rahms-Temper-Made-a-Comeback-
125919838.html#ixzz1nW3BeaIz
————————–
MARY ANN AHERN:
“In fact Emanuel’s temper can get the best of him. I found out
yesterday when I asked him a question about where his
children would go to school, and he let his famous temper emerge.
“(after the cameras were turned off) the Mayor of Chicago
positioned himself inches from my face and pointed his finger
directly at my head. He raised his voice and admonished me.
” ‘ How dare I ask where his children would go to school?!
You’ve done this before,’ he said.
“This was the Emanuel we had heard about, and it was
one of the oddest moments in my 29 years of reporting.”
———————————–
EXAMPLE # 3)
And then there’s this classic from Chicago lawyer, and pro-public school parent and activist Matt Farmer. Below, Farmer calls out Hyatt Hotels billionaire Penny Pritzker, who, at the time, was on Emanuel’s puppet, rubber-stamp Chicago Board of Education:
Dr. Ravitch wrote about this video above:
“Matt Farmer, a parent of children in the Chicago public schools, addresses a rally of the Chicago Teachers Union, where he “cross-examines” Penny Pritzker, the billionaire member of the Chicago Board of Education.
“Farmer is a trial lawyer. He describes how he bristled when he heard an interview on the radio in which Pritzker described what Chicago students need: enough skills in reading, mathematics, and science to be productive members of the workforce. Why no mention of the arts, of music, of physical education, he wondered.
“So he cross-examined Pritzker in absentia. Her own children attend the University of Chicago Lab School. Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children there too. Arne Duncan is a graduate.
“Farmer points out that the Lab School has a rich curriculum, not preparation for the workforce. Children there get the arts and physical education there every day. The Lab School has a beautiful library, and Pritzker is raising money to make it even grander and more beautiful. He asks the absent Pritzker, ‘Do you know that 160 public schools in Chicago don’t have a library?’
“The Lab School has seven teachers of the arts. In a high school that Pritzker voted to close, there was not a single arts teacher.
“Matt Farmer goes on to quote the director of the Lab School, who opposes standardized testing and insists upon a rich curriculum. The statement by the Lab School’s director about the importance of the union bring the assembled teachers to their feet, roaring and applauding.
“I hope Penny Pritzker and Rahm Emanual watch this video. People who have the good fortune to send their children to elite private schools should do whatever they can to spread the same advantages to other people’s children. When they are members of the board of education and the mayor, they have a special responsibility to do what is right for the children in their care. If they inflict policies on other people’s children that are unacceptable for their own children, they should be ashamed.”
I’d love to tweet this, but the videos and link are nonfunctional.
So, on doing a little quick research, I find that Lower Merion SD, 20 minutes “down the street” from Philly, is considered one of the top ten school districts by the Pittsburgh Times (as evidenced by the PSSA). I could only find data for the student/teacher ratio for three of their six elementary schools: Belmont Hills (12/teacher), Penn Valley (11/teacher), and Penn Wynne (12/teacher).
Then I looked for the teacher/student ratios for Gladwyne private schools. Lo and behold, they varied from SIX students per teacher to SEVENTEEN for K-8 schools. The highest rations were 54 to one in a Jewish Pre-K to K school, and a variance of 20/ to 25/teacher in three other Pre-K to K schools.
So, the results of my quick-and-dirty data mining begs the question, “if more really is better, then why don’t the public and private schools that cater to the wealthy insist on larger class sizes?”
Gee, I wonder!