This is a great—actually an inspiring—interview with Stephanie Rivera, who is probably the most prominent student leader on behalf of properly prepare teachers and supporting public education. Stephanie started a student movement while studying to be a teacher at Rutgers University. She has also been a critic of Teach for America because she intends to make a career of teaching, not a two-year experience.
As you will read, she is deeply committed to teaching in urban schools, and she believes that students need to have teachers who look like them.
Here is a small sample:
“ES: You wrote a terrific post called Advocacy in the Age of Color Blindness where you challenged the idea that it makes no different what color a teacher is as long as s/he’s great. I’m amazed that it’s even necessary to argue about this, but the *best and brightest* first mentality seems to be gaining traction.
SR: The whole argument that if students are succeeding and all of their teachers are white then it’s OK to have all white teachers really misses the point. First of all, how are we measuring student success? Is it all test scores? Because raising test scores isn’t the only role of a teacher and it shouldn’t be. What do students learn from having teachers who look like them? I really believe that when students of color see teachers who look like them in these great professions it sends a powerful message that *hey, I can do something like that too.* It’s also about the ability of teachers to understand where their student are coming from.
ES: As a soon-to-be teacher I wonder what you think about the brewing battle over tenure.
SR: I strongly believe in teacher tenure because it protects teachers who have a more political understanding of what teaching is about. I really think that we need to be having some serious discussions in our teacher education programs about what tenure is. Future teachers don’t understand what it is, what it does and where it came from. Tenure does more than just provide job security. It allows you to speak out against things you think are wrong. It allows you to have a progressive curriculum. People who are going into teaching need a bigger, broader understanding of tenure.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tenure is also good for the community in that it encourages a dedicated staff to make an investment in the community by sticking around. Everybody knows that most teachers do not leave tenured jobs to hop from district to district looking for better pay like so many job-hoppers in the private sector do. Stability in a teaching staff is key to providing consistency in education for the community. I think so many people forget this in the pro-tenure conversation. It is absolutely vital to the argument.
I hope Stephanie will find a teaching position where her intellect and savvy are honored. She will need to interview the interviewers to do this.
In Maryland for example, all teachers are supposed to buy into the ideology of management by objectives per Drucker, (1954) rebranded as pursuing student learning objectives, SLOs.
In that state, she will be expected to set learning targets for her students, give a pretest to establish baseline profiles on all of her students, then predict the gains in the scores that various subgroups will achieve on posttests. She will be expected to “embrace” this charade as a best practice.
The Baltimore Teacher’s Union signed on for this agenda, charted in a recent agreement and press release with signers of the new “memorandum of understanding.” The signers included the Maryland associations representing school boards, elementary and secondary principals, state board of education and a few other groups.
These SLOs will be rated for quality and RIGOR by the building principal or an external evaluator.
If Stephanie is hired to teach in Maryland, she and her colleagues will be told that their SLOs are a means to improve instruction and produce student “growth” a euphemism for an expected gain in test scores from pretest to posttest.
She and her colleagues with job-alike assignments will be stack rated on this measure and others, then classified as more or less effective.
The standard for being judged highly effective is likely to match the federal definition, producing more than a year’s worth of the average gain in test scores for teachers in job-alike assignments. That definition is a statistical construct totally disconnected from any understanding of what may be worth learning, why, and how learning may or may not be the direct result of her own teaching.
Maryland leaders in education want everyone to think of teaching as an occupation, a job with annual measures of productivity, not a profession where teachers will have the opportunity to think critically about what they are doing within an ethical and collegial climate they have shaped.
The Maryland compact is based in the premise that teachers need to be micromanaged, have a “common language,” and enlist their students to meet expected production quotas, expressed as increments in test scores.
I find the Maryland compact chilling. SLOs are being used to evaluate teachers in at least 30 states. They are becoming as important as VAM for teacher evaluation. They are even less reliable and less valid than VAM for evaluating individual teachers.
This is not an argument for Stephanie to remove herself as a candidate for a position in districts with these policies, but to enter any position with her eyes wide open, and a heap of courage to work for changes in policies without merit, evidence. I whole she has and will hold dear a far more ample vision of the purposes of education than the production of annual gains in test scores.
You need to read the review of literature for SLO:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=REL2013002.
You have to download the pdf.
Here is a quote on page 11 of the pdf.
“Whether the ability of SLOs to distinguish among teachers represents true differences in teacher performance or random statistical noise remains to be determined. No studies have attempted to measure the reliability of SLO ratings.”
The biggest problem with SLOs is the underlying assumptions about what education is – a top-down transfer of knowledge and skills from teacher to student. It leaves no room for what the student him/herself brings to the table as far as interests, experiences, curiosity, culture, aptitudes, strengths, limitations, understanding, interpretation, etc. It assumes that there is a unified body of knowledge/range of skills that all students need to know/be able to do. If the country could get past these ridiculous assumptions, ideas about teacher “accountability” related to those assumptions would naturally fall apart and both students and teachers would be much better off.
Having more teachers of color have been overlooked as a powerful advantage in schools with students of both color AND whilte. In fact, there are more gay and lesbian teachers than teachers of color in my district. So my point is does “it sends a powerful message that *hey, I can do something like that too.* It’s also about the ability of teachers to understand where their student are coming from” (Rivera).
In my opinion, I agree with Rivera that a teacher sets a precedented in the classroom as role model. This role model is not to be taken lightly, because they are with someone’s child everyday from 5 to 18 yrs of age. Teachers affect how students think of themselves emotionally and academically. We are their surrogate parent.
Would it be controversial if white children had teachers of color throughout their school years? While teachers bring their biases to the classroom, they also bring culture difference as well. Because the minority is becoming the majority, we are behind in supporting and preparing for this reality in more ways than one. We need a balance of teachers from different background, because we are teaching a diverse population. Suburban white kids need to have teachers of color to open their world to end stereotyping, prejudice and misconceptions. This is the most powerful way of ending racial divide not to mention racial segregation in schools as the plutocrats are trying to achieve. We can’t just talk about different cultures or sexual preferences, etc., in the classroom, but we have to live among each other to get the full effect to make change within ourselves.