Greta Callahan’s article about teaching kindergarten in Minneapolis went viral. She wrote her article in response to one that appeared in the same paper asserting the “worst teachers are in the poorest schools.” She teaches in one of the poorest schools, and she tells her story.
To those who parrot the false claim that low test scores are caused by “bad teachers,” she offers a counter-narrative. She explains the burdens suffered by her students and the stress of being evaluated by a rubric that makes no sense.
Let’s start with what it means to be a “good teacher.” As the article says: “The district uses three different tools to evaluate teachers: classroom observations, a student survey and student achievement data.” Let’s put that into the perspective of a Bethune kindergarten teacher.
• Classroom observations: We have four per year. The teacher receives points based on standardized criteria; the feedback is generally helpful. But these observations also involve the observer walking up to students and asking what they are doing. Even my 5-year-olds, who may have just started school, get asked this question. The student is supposed to regurgitate the “I can” statement that correlates to “Focused Instruction.” The usual response, though, is something along the lines of “math” or “Jaden took my crayon!”
If you were in my room, observing an observation, you would laugh. I promise.
• Student surveys: I administer a student survey once a year. My 5-year-olds have to circle their responses (even though they can’t read) to questions about their teacher and school. Have you been around a 5-year-old? They are adorable, spacey, loud and unfocused — and under no circumstances does this student survey make sense for them or to them.
• Student achievement data: Two to three times a year, our students are pulled out of our classrooms and tested by a stranger from the district. When she asks our kids to go into a separate room with her and gives them a test, most of them shut down. It’s intimidating to them. Some are asked to take this test in the middle of breakfast; others are tested right after recess. The inconsistency of when our children are tested creates a test that isn’t being measured consistently or accurately, in my opinion.
These are the “achievement data” that are referenced in the article. The scores are often low and rarely reflect the students’ actual achievements. My fellow teachers and I have plenty of conflicting and affirming evidence to support our students’ actual achievements, growth and knowledge. But this evidence is not considered when determining the effectiveness of a teacher.
Recruiting and retaining teachers at a high-poverty school present unusual challenges:
The retention rate of teachers at my school and others like it will not go up unless we have more incentive to stay — and more assistance to attempt to give our students an even chance.
At Bethune, many of our students are what most Americans would define as starving. At least a third are HHM (homeless/highly mobile), see violence in their homes or neighborhoods regularly and come to school with baggage many of us couldn’t imagine, let alone at age 5. Yet they are expected to meet the standards of kindergartners at upwardly mobile neighborhood schools like Burroughs and Hale. As far as the tests are concerned, a teacher is a teacher and a student is a student.
There are plenty of reasons why a teacher might not want to teach in a school like Bethune. Say, physical safety. Within the last two weeks, I have been slapped so hard in the face by a student that I had to seek emergency care; have been threatened by a student who said he was going to go home, come back and hurt me, because I wrote him up for hurting one of my kindergartners, and have broken up numerous fights. My fellow teachers and I have had parents threaten our safety more times than I can count — threats delivered on school property, in front of students. And, lest anyone be misinformed, there is no combat pay for working at a school like mine.
My children are happy to come to school and they are eager to learn. But sometimes they just lose it. A student will throw a chair across the room, or scissors at other students, or kick and punch me. It takes time, love and energy to find out why they are doing this. Many are imitating behaviors they see at home. Sometimes they have bottled-up feelings about something they have experienced and don’t know how to handle their anger. So, I teach them. I love them. I’m consistently there for them. I report their situation to Hennepin County all too often.
Many of our children do not have someone who will look over their work with them at night or take them to an activity. Our parents are generally very young and trying their best. It takes a village, but our village is poverty-stricken in every imaginable way.
Please read Greta Callahan’s article. She says succinctly what most teachers experience and know: Teaching is hard work. Low scores are caused not by “bad teachers,” but by terrible life circumstances that harm children and families. Of course, teachers should be evaluated, but not in the idiotic way she describes. Teachers who flounder need help and peer assistance. If they can’t teach, after sustained efforts to help them, they should leave teaching. But the narrative of “bad teachers cause low scores” is wrong. It ignores the effects of the single biggest blight on our society: growing poverty and inequality.
This school and the school district are very lucky to have a teacher of the quality of Greta Callahan. Instead of being abused, micromanaged and second guessed by the administrators and the reform gang, she should be honored and supported. She certainly must experience trauma and PTSD from all the physical assaults that she has had to endure.
I agree with some of or maybe all of what is written here, but what I have trouble with is alienating kids of Anglo-Saxon heritage out of sheer revenge and hatred.
I have worked in those high-poverty schools. If you can manage to be mediocre, you are doing a fantastic job. The thing is, if we keep requiring this many ridiculous things, just to prove competency, we are going to run out of anyone to teach in these kinds of schools. I’m a sub. I’ve seen classes where I know how well their teacher manages them, but they get me for the day and it immediately turns into chaos. I finally gave up teaching in the high poverty district, even though sub pay there was $30 more than in the other district where I’m registered. My classroom management just isn’t up to what it takes, and I can only imagine a school like this staffed with birds of passage like me, TFA’ers and untenured teachers, replaced every year or so, for these sort of arbitrary “faults”.
Humanity and love are a teacher’s “best friend” and yet success according to RTTT is about “dog eat dog” competition. This kindergarten teacher clearly poignantly reveals this.
So who stands a chance in this UNIFORM/COMMON CORE/SAME HIGH STAKES TESTING FOR ALL atmosphere? The wealthy child who takes piano lessons after school and gets help with homework from mom or dad or even a paid tutor, or the child who goes to school having had potato chips for dinner with little sleep because she was listening to her neighbors upstairs fighting loudly all night? Which child is ready to learn when they enter that classroom? Which teacher do you think has an easier time of dealing with the one-size-fits-all rubrics forced upon EVERYONE that do not take into account the effects of poverty? Title one public school teachers can answer that one! They are losing their jobs based on this (aka the kindergarten teacher in this article)!
A little bit of humanity will go a long way (whenever this is allowed to enter back into public education). I am thinking of the recent basketball game between two college teams. They played two weeks earlier and one opposing team agreed to play at the other school’s court. Why? To accommodate a player who was dying of brain cancer with only two weeks to live. The opposing team members acted like HUMANS… gave up their home court advantage, agreed to play two weeks in advance, were teary-eyed during the game, ate dinner the night before with their opponents (laughing and having a good time). The joy they were able to give to the dying basketball player was “THE WIN”. This defines “educational success”.. not who “won” or “lost” this actual game. Our current public education system is all about DATA and pseudo DATA at best and pits one human against another. TIME TO PUT AN END TO NCLB/RTTT/COMMON CORE/PEARSON and to start really allowing our nations’ public school students to have a genuine learning experience without the “win/lose” ideology.
Imagine if a dentist were given a rubric beyond his/her control and then fired for it… A typical “beyond his/her control” question might be…
“How many patients had a cavity, received dental advice and then returned to have another cavity filled at a future time?”
Would the dentist want to work for wealthy individuals with top-line dental plans that are likely to be able to come in for regular check-ups? Or would the doctor choose to work in a low income neighborhood where a simple bus break-down might prevent a person from getting to their appointment? Where a person is less likely to have a state of the art Oral B electric toothbrush (more likely to have an ordinary brush) and is less likely to buy floss and use it daily due to the expense of buying floss (buy floss or milk???)? Hmmm… in the end this way of thinking is not a philosophy concerned about “lifting” humans to the highest they can be. It is about something else… and we public school teachers know what that something else is… “control and profit-mongering greed” coming from the corporate world imposing its values on the “values” of a democracy on which are nation was originally founded … “WE THE PEOPLE” (not We the corporations… and maybe the People).
artseagal: thank you for reminding us of Lauren Hill. For an online piece detailing the latest—
Link: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/sports/columnists/john-erardi/2014/11/08/erardi-lauren-hill-tells-uc-crowd-she-cant-believe-support/18700033/
Yes, the self-styled “education reform” crowd is all about the ‘hard data points’ aka who won the game. They take after their accountabully underlings with their deceptive numerical chimeras like 100% charter graduation rates and taking students from the 13th to the 90th percentile and raising graduation rates by leaving out the ‘rate suppressors.’
They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
This posting, and the article by Greta Callahan it links to, are why I write that Mother Teresa was surely talking about teachers (among many others, of course) when she stated:
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
And do them over and over and over again.
Although she also noted:
“I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.”
Thank you, Greta Callahan for all you do, day after day after day.
😎
Test scores do not measure the quality of teaching. Test scores measure the lack of learning.
Teachers teach.
Students do the learning.
What happens when students refuse to cooperate and learn? To understand how this happens, all anyone has to do is Google: the effects of poverty on learning
Here are a few of the hits of more than 98-million when I did that search just now:
School readiness reflects a child’s ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills (9). It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
Beginning at birth, the attachment formed between parent and child predicts the quality of future relationships with teachers and peers (Szewczyk-Sokolowski, Bost, & Wainwright, 2005) and plays a leading role in the development of such social functions as curiosity, arousal, emotional regulation, independence, and social competence (Sroufe, 2005). The brains of infants are hardwired for only six emotions: joy, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, and fear (Ekman, 2003). …
Children raised in poverty are much less likely to have these crucial needs met than their more affluent peers are and, as a result, are subject to some grave consequences. Deficits in these areas inhibit the production of new brain cells, alter the path of maturation, and rework the healthy neural circuitry in children’s brains, thereby undermining emotional and social development and predisposing them to emotional dysfunction (Gunnar, Frenn, Wewerka, & Van Ryzin, 2009; Miller, Seifer, Stroud, Sheinkopf, & Dickstein, 2006).
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109074/chapters/how-poverty-affects-behavior-and-academic-performance.aspx
Hundreds of studies, books, and reports have examined the detrimental
effects of poverty on the well-being of children. Many have been summarized
in recent reports such as Wasting America’s Future from the Children’s Defense
Fund and Alive and Well? from the National Center for Children in Poverty.5
However, while the literature on the effects of poverty on children is large,
many studies lack the precision necessary to allow researchers to disentangle
the effects on children of the array of factors associated with poverty.
Understanding of these relationships is key to designing effective policies to
ameliorate these problems for children. …
For low-income children, a $10,000 increase
in mean family income between birth and
age 5 was associated with nearly a full-year
increase in completed schooling.
Poor children suffer from emotional and
behavioral problems more frequently
than do nonpoor children.
Click to access 07_02_03.pdf
>>>>>>How did the causes of poverty and overcoming it become the teacher’s fault?<<<<<
“Test scores do not measure the quality of teaching. Test scores measure the lack of learning. Teachers teach.Students do the learning.”What happens when students refuse to cooperate and learn? ”
Been saying that forever. Now that is the question. But all this is known.
THEY, the propagandists have the bully pulpit… they won the election, these liars. Krugman go it right… the Triumph of the Wrong!
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Triumph-of-the-Wrong-by-P-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Conservative_Intellectual_Krugman_LIES-141107-86.html#comment518947
Thanks for your links…I added them to my notesI for a blog I will do on the subject of how income inequality affects the kids…but I remember how that worked. I taught one class in the Bronx, when they assigned me upon my return to NYC in 1988.
There were 22 kids in that second grade, all held over because they still could not read…at 8 years of age. I met some of the parents, most were lovely people who cared for their children but were either so ignorant or so poor that they did nothing that enabled them to learn. Some parents were in jail, and drugs were a problem in too many families.
I did my best… and all of them were promoted, some to top third grades… which was a miracle since they came to me unable to read… something that did make me wonder what went wrong during the 3 previous years they were in school. The school had some real culpability here, as I discovered.
I did MY thing, ignoring the demands and mandates of administration, and THAT caused me no end of trouble. I did not realize that things had changed since I left teaching to raise my sons. Mandated curricula and lessons were anti-learning and I avoided the stuff so I was INSUBORDINATE.
Luckily, the position at East Side Middle School in ‘tony’ district 2 became available, and I ran. To this day, I feel guilty, because those Bronx kids had a chance with a teacher like me who understood what learning looked like, and how to enable it… for crying out loud…how hard is it to get a child of 8 to learn reading skills if you make it easy and fun.
Anyway, the rest you know…in clouding the fact that at ESMS my students were top scorers on all tests of reading and writing in NYC, and they still charged me with incompetence… go know.
KrazyTa… I am reflecting on the comment, “But we can do small things with great love”…
We indeed are doing great things when we do small things with great love and in unity … one raindrop does not feed a garden, but a good rainfall certainly does!
Let the ONE PERCENT reflect on that. They are controlling “those raindrops” to descend on only “their field” enabling THEIR patch to flourish while everything else shrivels away.
A recently released ranking of schools by Wallet Hub (http://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/) does not use poverty level as an indicator, The Wallet Hub ranking analyzed 12 key metrics — from student-teacher ratios and dropout rates to test scores and bullying incident rates.
Yet it is easy to see a high correlation between their rankings and data on “children in poverty” 2012 (http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/43-children-in-poverty#ranking/2/any/true/868/any/322)
The three top ranked schools (New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont) have a “children in poverty” level of 15% where as the three bottom ranked schools (Alabama, Mississippi, District of Columbia) have poverty levels of 27%, 35% and 27% respectively.
IT WOULD HELP IF YOU WENT TO THE LINK AND ADDED YOUR COMMENTS THERE, because the readers are NOT teachers, and need to hear TEACHERS besides ME!
cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Greta-Callahan-Walk-in-My-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Children_Diane-Ravitch_Kindergarten_Response-141109-283.html#comment519239
with this commentary Submitted on Sunday, Nov 9, 2014 at 11:19:18 AM: “Go to my author’s page and read my resume.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
Know that my practice was celebrated and that I was the cohort for the National Standards research, and the NY State Educator of Excellence, and 4 time included in ‘Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers,’ — when I was evaluated by the subjective criteria of a NYC principal and then slandered by the district superintendent because I blew the whistle on her incompetent gal pal (the director years earlier).
“I was evaluated as ‘incompetent.’ One would imagine that the union would grieve such outright lies, but the site rep wanted my position and the Manhattan rep was complicit in emptying the schools of veteran teachers and breaking tenure. Parents went crazy when I disappeared but nothing changed… they evaluated me out of the system, even as my students scored at the top of NYC and were accepted to althea op high schools.
“It was 1998 and the hidden war on teachers was in full swing in NYC,
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/The_Insane_War_on_Teachers_and_Democracy.html
the largest of the 15,880 school districts which would use the same destructive process to remove the professional voices of experienced teachers.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
— destroying the public school system which is now being replaced by charter schools.
https://vimeo.com/4199476
All these years later, evaluating those bad teachers has become the national narrative, thanks to the shill Duncan, and the $$$ from the Broad/Koch/Walton/ Gates secret coalition of those determined to make the education industry their ‘cash-cow’ while secretly ending the road to opportunity that is public education.
“Democracy is the final victim as Ed Hirsh notes in “The American Educator” in 2009:Creating a Curriculum for the American People: Our Democracy … DEPENDS ON shared knowledge.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
“They subverted the national conversation about education
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/08/subverting-the-national-conversation-a.html
and made it about teaching so they could evaluate the professional out of the schools. The ONLY conversation in the research on national standards was about LEARNING…what it really looks like, and how the brain acquires skills.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
The only conversations about TEACHING was to recognize what BEST PRACTICE LOOKS LIKE…. WHICH THEY DID when they matched mine to THE PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING, which was the authentic rubric of the GENUINE NATIONAL STANDARDS RESEARCH funded by Pew, run by Harvard and the LRDC at the Univ. of Pittsburgh.
“Oh, you never heard of it?????
“No surprise, we have no Snowden to tell you how you have been bamboozled,
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
… and people are too busy and stressed to figure out this complex issue, so the liars triumph as Krugman explains, just as they did in the midterm elections. http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Triumph-of-the-Wrong-by-P-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Conservative_Intellectual_Krugman_LIES-141107-86.html#comment518947
Thomas Friedman puts it this way: ” When the people governing us become this cynical, polarized and dysfunctional, it surely seeps down into the bureaucracy.
“Evaluating kindergarten teachers this way, is the height of cynicism and why the schools are dysfunctional.. and “THEY” know it… it is “their” plan”
Yes! Please add comments on the Star Tribune website. Thank you!
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/281861351.html
Teachers are routinely subjected to flawed, really stupid, measures of their effectiveness under the banner of accountability.
The widestread use of three measurements–student surveys, one-size-fits-all observation scores, and student test scores– is, of course the outcome of Bill Gates’ investment, over $64 million, in a screwed-up pilot program conducted under the leadership of Harvard economists and colleagues.
The project, called Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) earned more publicity than it deserved only because these were Harvard economists, not educators, and some enjoyed preening before Congress and cameras as if they, and Gates, had found the secret of measuring “effective” teaching.
Problem 1. The economists who ran the study thought they could just go to school districts in multiple states and “randomly assign students to classrooms” and use the test scores of students in these random assignments as required for VAM, offering “proof” that VAM was not the problem, schools just were not set up to do the random assignment that the algorithms needed for any claim to validity/reliability.
Mistakes.: The economists assumed the scores from state tests were enough alike to churn out VAM ratings for all teachers. They discovered that scores on state tests were not, in fact, comparable and could not be made so by acrobatics with math. They also assumed that random assignments–made by administrators in exchange for Gates money–would stay in place. Of course, this mathematically desirable system of assignment soon created a complex version of musical chairs in many schools. Big news to economists, not to educators.
Problem 2. Observations were tried, most with the Danielson framework. The researchers were were not able to secure the requisite number of observations from real live classrooms–too wiggly for reliability checks. So teachers were paid a sum to video-tape some of their instruction and armies of evaluators were trained to rate the videos on the Danielson framework. Credible reliability (consistency in ratings, same rater, multiple raters) were extracted only with six rounds of observation. So they tried some shorter clips, and so on. The point is this: The Danielson framework is one size fits all. It has no reliability or validity research to back its use in every grade and subject. In the MET stud, raters did not use all of the rubrics, or all of the gradations in rubrics. This is a deeply flawed measure. The MET project did not do a full-spectrum test of all of the grades and subjects in live classrooms. So who cares, the MET report is from famous Harvard economists.
Problem 3. The student survey in the MET project came from economist Ron Ferguson. The original version asked students over 20 questions that were not about the teacher at all but the environment for student learning at home. The version now on the market–not the only one– is structured around seven constructs. It has been expanded for K-12. It is supposed to be “objective” only if it is administered under proctored conditions. A brief analysis will show that teachers are more likely to score “high” if they are in “hovercraft” and “sage on the stage” modes much of the time and engage in a lot of direct instruction, assign and check homework, etc. Four of the seven constructs have this tilt.
So, if you are wondering why these three types of measures have come to define “effective” teachers, ruling out so many other of the possibilities, you can name Bill Gates and his hired hands, clueless economists.
I suggest that these self-appointed experts be assigned a failing grade in defining an “effective” teachers. These are the three measures that do the job in too many schools and they affirm that economists like to engage in circular reasoning. The scores on these measures provide the definition of “effective” and cut off more ample ways of thinking.
More ample evaluations of teachers might lead to praise for their heroic work with students– life-changing for some, but not evident in test scores. How about some acknowledgement of wisdom gained from experience–not easily reduced to test scores or metrics. Why not honor teachers for the passion and ingenuity that makes for memorable learning? How about giving teachers credit for advanced degrees that enhance their work well beyond a test score? Economists and statisticians have reified a handy and pitiful measures as if these are imperative for “accountability.”
The number crunchers wear blinders. They engage in a studied indifference to the magic moments that make teaching and learning a joy. They don’t want to know about such “soft” measures as recognition from your colleagues or the unsolicited praise offered by students, parents, former students sometimes decades after they left a classroom.
We need to reclaim the meaning of effective teaching from bean counters and billionaires.
For an informed critique of the MET project see Rothstein, J. & Mathis, W. J. (2013). Have we identi-fied effective teachers? Culminating findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching project. (Re-view). Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013.
Stability versus churn and chaos. People with resources, know that the key to success is stability for their kids. When will school reform champion stability? It’s a simple solution.
Stability costs more… burn and churn of teachers is much cheaper
Remember it’s not about the kids…
She only touched upon the utter ridiculousness of the same evaluation rubric being used for all grade levels and subjects when stating that the observers ask the students what they are learning. In order to score high on the rubric, the focus is on “student led” learning. With testing beginning a week after school starts and being one-on-one, Kindergarten teachers literally have to have students engaged in independent activities without the benefit of time to establish procedures and practice, practice, practice them under teacher supervision. Observers expect to walk in to a Kindergarten classroom that has children “grappling” with problems in cooperative learning groups in early October when the teacher has barely had time to teach them the prerequisite social skills necessary to cooperate because the only time of the day that students have to practice these skills can not be appropriately monitored because it is the only time she is able to test them one-on-one. Many times there are more important procedures children need to learn in the beginning of the year, like pulling their pants down AFTER they get inside the bathroom.
This is the story of many teachers who are faced with the same circumstances. Teachers are evaluated as educators and held responsible for things they have no control over when you teach in inner-city schools. Teachers have a responsibility to teach and students have a responsibility to learn. The problem is that since parents are not held accountable for their children’s education, students don’t take responsibility for their learning. Many times they feel that no one cares at home, so why should they? It is so much easier to find fault with teachers, criticize them and hold them responsible. But when are we going to learn that it takes more than teachers but a village to raise a child.
How do we fight this? We need national protests or something.
Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
This Kindergarten teacher’s article illustrates that one size does NOT fit all when it comes to evaluation and poverty DOES matter… a LOT more than “bad teachers”.
Reblogged this on Public Schools Central and commented:
Systemic education reform misses the point. To reform the entire system demands a reframing of the “system” itself. The “system” is the community in which schools are located. Reform the community first. Bring jobs that pay a living wage to the community. Address the needs of families who are often headed by very young, ill-prepared parents who are caught in the cycle of poverty. Renew the spirit of President Johnson’s War on Poverty initiatives. Instead of merely touting Finland’s education system as an exemplar, examine their efforts in eliminating childhood poverty as the precursor to educational achievement. Schools and teachers alone cannot solve these problems.
Amen.
Thank you so much for posting this, Diane. Thank you to Greta for finding the courage and energy to write it. MPS need all the support they can get right now.
Wow! I didn’t even know that people were reblogging or blogging about this! Thank you so much for the support and dialogue- I feel so united with teachers across the country right now!