The Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), composed of leaders from both the AFT and the NEA, issued a report representing their vision of what good public schools should do to improve student learning and to build a respected teaching profession. The link contains both the executive summary and the full report.
The report begins with this rationale:
With major changes to public education coming from top-down prescriptions in recent decades, schools have shifted from their original purpose – advancing the common good. More than 20 years ago, the National TURN began convening classroom teachers and teacher leaders for a series of open discussions around the country. We asked participants: How must we strengthen public education in ways that reflect the collective wisdom of teachers? How can public education, once again, become “the great equalizer” and the foundation for our democracy? How could it be made to benefit all our students, not just some? And how must we change, too, so that teachers and their unions become agents of needed improvements?
Our TURN: Revitalizing Public Education and Strengthening Democracy Through the Collective Wisdom of Teachers lays out a fresh, exciting, teacher-led vision on what it will take to improve our public education system and reestablish its rightful place as the cornerstone of our democracy. Drawing from research-based practices and the experiences and ideas of classroom teachers across the country about what works, we highlight creative and innovative solutions that place students at the center of learning, support teachers as professionals, promote equity, and advance negotiated agreements that improve student learning. The report provides a clear and compelling roadmap for education policymakers, practitioners and advocates alike towards a revitalized system of public education that benefits all our students.
And here is the vision:
Our TURN: Revitalizing Public Education and Strengthening Our Democracy Through the Collective Wisdom of Teachers
As teachers and teacher unionists, we believe that teaching and learning can be transformed if we embrace a new vision of education that rests on four pillars, each of which bears equal weight:
1. If we want schools to prepare student to be career and college ready, thoughtful citizens, and reflective human beings, then schools should be safe, learner-centered and well-resourced to serve the needs of each individual student.
2. If teachers are the most important in-school determinant of student learning, then teaching must be recognized as a true profession.
3. If America needs to tap into the talents of all students, irrespective of their background, then educational excellence must be inclusive and education redesign must be accompanied by changes in other aspects of students’ lives.
4. If all education policy must ultimately be about enhancing opportunities for students to learn, then collective bargaining (and other forms of collaborative decision-making) between teachers and management should always aim to advance student learning.
The Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a coalition of teachers and teacher union leaders from AFT and NEA union locals, was founded 20 years ago “to promote progressive reforms in education and in teacher unions.” To all who are engaged in the debate about the future of public education – whether practitioners or policymakers — this document lays out precisely what we aspire to.
We begin with our idea of what education, schools and classrooms could and should look like, then turn to the policies needed to bring about that vision.
It is a good report. It refutes the common refrain from corporate reformers that there is no alternative to their cramped and toxic practice of high-stakes testing and school choice. It is a public school response to the Betsy DeVos’ belief in the free market of charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.
This is a worthy presentation of a well-resourced public school system, staffed by experienced teachers whose collective voices are represented in the policymaking process, and whose voices carry more weight than those of the politicians who write unreasonable and impossible mandates.
I’m interested in the comments on this one.
Meanwhile, Secretary DeVos reveals her priority list: https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2017-10-11/betsy-devos-outlines-vision-for-american-education
#11 is the most suspicious. Placed last, but should be #1 considering that Trump is looking to get rid of the laws that now govern for-profit colleges that have been preying on VA education funds. There is ALWAYS some underlying motive. I suspect a resurgence of Trump U, DeVry, ITT and Corinthian.
I was most curious about #2. There was no explicit mention of tests, but I wonder how else she intends to measure student outcomes. Anyways, I don’t trust her list.
Public schools shouldn’t bother applying for federal grants.
Not a priority.
Here is the full list of the priorities:
1 “Empowering Families to Choose a High-Quality Education that Meets Their Child’s Unique Needs”
2 “Promoting Innovation and Efficiency, Streamlining Education with an Increased Focus on Improving Student Outcomes, and Providing Increased Value to Students and Taxpayers”
3 “Fostering Flexible and Affordable Paths to Obtaining Knowledge and Skills”
4 “Fostering Knowledge and Promoting the Development of Skills that Prepare Students to be Informed, Thoughtful, and Productive Individuals and Citizens”
5 “Meeting the Unique Needs of Students And Children, including those with Disabilities and/or with Unique Gifts and Talents”
6″Promoting Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education, With a Particular Focus on Computer Science”
7 “Promoting Literacy”
8 “Promoting Effective Instruction in Classrooms and Schools”
9 “Promoting Economic Opportunity”
10 “Encouraging Improved School Climate and Safer and More Respectful Interactions in a Positive and Safe Educational Environment”
11 “Ensuring that Service Members, Veterans, and Their Families Have Access to High-Quality Educational Choices”
Translation:
1 Of course it’s number one-it’s all about school choice.
2 Attempts in measuring the immeasurable.
3 Computer training
4 Hmmm, what if a student and his/her parents don’t want to be “informed, thoughtful and productive”???
5 Meeting those needs with high cost private education and/or the private schools sloughing those students off on what’s left of the public schools.
6 More computer training
7 As if schools don’t teach students to read now.
8 The Ditz wouldn’t know “effective instruction” if it bit her in the arse.
9 Shut up, obey and be slave wagers.
10 More guns in schools to kill those grizzlies.
11 Provide choice but no monies.
Good for them. If ed reformers won’t invite public schools to Harvard conferences on “reinventing education” – therefore excluding the schools that serve 90% of families- start your own thing.
In a way it’s freeing, right? Could be a positive. They may not even notice, as little attention as is paid to public schools so there won’t be any organized pushback.
Next- stop hiring them as consultants to public schools. Eva Moskowitz would never hire someone who lobbied against charters as a consultant IN charters. Public schools shouldn’t either.
“3. If America needs to tap into the talents of all students, irrespective of their background, then educational excellence must be inclusive and education redesign must be accompanied by changes in other aspects of students’ lives.”
Yes, I suppose so, but the devil is in the details. What specific changes are we talking about and how exactly do we go about making those life changes? The current trend is to try to punish families into being part of their children’s education. Making parents sign homework and reading agreements, reading logs, report cards, etc. If the parents don’t sign, then the kid gets punished (speaking from experience on this one). The educational equivalent of “give me all your money or the kitten gets shot.”
A fundamental truth is that you can’t force other people to change, and so much of what’s been wrong with education “reform” has been making exactly that error.
Dienne,
I read that line to mean improvements in children’s access to good medical care, nutrition, safe neighborhoods, better economic conditions.
I hope that’s what it means.
“Making parents sign homework and reading agreements, reading logs, report cards, etc.” Usually the parents and the teacher agree together about this stipulation: having the parents sign the various documents, homework, etc. Sometimes the parents even demand it because they want to make sure their child is doing his/her assignments and that he/she is not trying to dodge his/her responsibilities. It can also be part of an IEP which forces the teacher to make such a demand of the parents. If a child is doing all of his/her assignments, then there is no real need to have parents sign off on the various assignments. As for report cards, parents have been signing report cards since the stone ages.
“Usually the parents and the teacher agree together about this stipulation: having the parents sign the various documents, homework, etc.”
Can you tell me where that school is? It’s not the school that my daughter attends. At her school, that policy is mandatory from admin down and any child whose parents don’t sign on demand gets detention. This is not a charter school, incidentally.
And I don’t know when the stone ages were, but apparently they were after my time because my parents never had to sign a report card. Most of my cohort that I’ve talked to have said the same.
Wow, your daughter’s school is very punitive to the point of overkill! When I taught, there was no such demand or stricture for all parents. The children were certainly not given detention if the parents didn’t sign a document (or more likely the child did not bother to show the paper to be signed by the parent). I would call the parents to find out what was going on and they would usually appreciate the phone call to keep their child on target and up to date. The tradition at my school district was to have parents sign the report cards. I guess it varies from school district to school district.
In my district, something that a parent “must sign” is assigned as homework with a point value (5 pts). If it’s turned in late the child gets 1/2 credit and if it’s not turned in at all, it gets a 0. All I know is that the environment in school is hostile to parent volunteers, so this is a way of keeping the parents involved….but out of the building! It might not be this way in other school systems.
The US Department of Education spent tens of thousands of dollars yesterday to go to a public school…and promote private schools:
“Today, 26 states and the District of Columbia offer more than 50 different private school choice programs…”
The people there must have been baffled. Why did these federal employees come all this way to ignore public schools while standing IN a public school?
The wacky world of ed reform. The boilerplate doesn’t change no matter the circumstances or physical location.
There’s a new law being proposed in Ohio and supported by a significant number of public school principals and superintendents. The law would reduce some of the mandates on public schools. I don’t really agree with it but my sense is it’s desperate.
They know they won’t get any support from Columbus or DC so they’re hoping to just break loose and go it alone. I’m sort of surprised it didn’t happen sooner. If your choices are “affirmatively bad and harmful” or “nothing” you’ll select “nothing”.
All resistance is good. Resistance, no matter how meek, builds more resistance. Only democracy can defeat oligarchy, so long as we have the right to vote.
The “new vision” sounds a lot like the old vision of public education before NCLB in which teachers were subject to a certain number of rules and regulations, but most of the had a certain level of autonomy in the classroom. In fact, from the late eighties, through most of the nineties, the district in which I worked created a collaborative work environment in which administration and teachers worked together to improve outcomes for students.
So called “reform” has produced an adversarial relationship between teachers, administrators and the state. States have been colluding with free market ideologues to crush the teaching profession, commodify students, and quash democratic control of public education. The results have not been worth the cost, and the atmosphere under DeVos is even worse. She does not even care about outcomes along as she can transfer public funds in private pockets and blow up unions. Students are not the priority now; access to public funds is the main interest.
You’re more optimistic than I am, retired teacher. So much money has been (and will be) poured (wasted?) into tests that I can’t imagine the Ed Reform crown backing off.
They don’t really need to back off because the tests are actually baked into their latest plan: Pearsonalized learning.
It’s got everything they could hope for. Common standards and tests, elimination of teachers, and billions for tech companies.
I am not optimistic, but I do believe with enough support from social justice, teachers and parent groups, it will be difficult for the privateers to continue to crush the resistance. Most of the free market crowd will not back off as long as there is money to be made. If enough people support public education, they can pressure representatives to support public education or lose their seat. That is the only way to get a response from government. I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful.
Then we are more in agreement than I thought. I’m probably less hopeful than you. To this point, it seems like…
Ed Reform $$$ >>> anti-Reform sentiment
…but I continue to wait for people to lose public offices because of ed policy positions
I am hopeful because lots of people are protesting DeVos’ visits. We need this pressure to continue to let people know that many people reject her policies. We are winning in the court of public opinion. What Diane is doing in Oakland is important. Building a coalition of like minded groups that unite for the common cause of public education and turning the united front into activism is important work. It needs to grow.
Exactly right.
Totally with you guys. Still wish more politicians would pay for their positions. (Jeb’s contributed to his disastrous presidential run; Kasich’s did not; what will happen to Governor Cuomo?)
I wonder who will read the report with any understanding of the points or better yet agreement.
USA today reported that 20,000 teachers could be out of work because they qualify for DACA. The only data and sources in the whole report were from TFA.
I heard on KPFA that you’ll be in the Oakland area to speak. I wish I could attend! I was able to attend a panel discussion you participated in a few years ago at Stanford University. You are a shinning light in the dark!
Thank you for being a voice for public education!
Imagine that you have a housekeeper. Every time this person goes to do something, you stand over him or her and tell this person what to do. No, move the cloth in circles, not up and down. You’ll leave streaks. No, load the smaller plates on the left. What are you doing? Those are the linens for the guest room. You missed a spot.
You would, of course, drive this person away. And you would completely eliminate any possibility that your housekeeper might come up with ideas on his or her own for improvements: All this mess could be consolidated in bins in the closet in the foyer.
People flourish and do their best work under conditions of autonomy. Take away their divine freedom, reduce them to servo-mechanical status, and you will get what you asked for. I remember a time when department meetings weren’t occasions for reading out the instructions from administrators, when there was a great debate raging in the country about the wisdom of school-based versus district-based decision making, when teachers in those meetings chose their textbooks, discussed what pedagogical approaches they were going to take, and then relayed these decisions to their administrators who thought of THEM as the experts on teaching Spanish or World History or English or Mathematics.
The Ed Deformers have long wanted, of course, to replace teachers with teaching machines. That’s because the major costs in schools are facilities and teacher’s salaries and because a LOT of money is to be made in the mechanization of the education of prole children, something that will NEVER HAPPEN in the schools of the children of the leaders of the New Feudal Order. So, all this top-down stuff–the standards and testing regime, the ten thousand emails per school year from administrators, all marked “Urgent!”–an interim step toward that goal.
But people don’t work like that. Teddy Roosevelt once said, if you want something done, find someone who can do it and get the hell out of his way.
Precisely.
People working in Quality Control in manufacturing industries have long known this. Quality flows from the bottom up. You know what flows from the top down.
An Alternative to Top-Down Invariant Standards and Standardized Tests
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” and testing like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
in place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researcher, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open
national portal or wiki, and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development, freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
Teachers, TURN is not your friend. Diane, elsewhere on your site you seem to celebrate Eli Broad’s retirement–you must know he funds TURN. Teachers, and anyone else who has a “supervisor,” need a real union–not a toothless “association” or worse a “company union.”
How about some TURN success stories (from rank and file members, not union leaders)?
Paul,
While I am inclined to see anything funded by Eli Broad in education in a negative light, given his known hostility to public schools, you should point out what you find objectionable in the report. Maybe Eli didn’t get what he paid for.
Yes, it’s all fine stuff, but we don’t need TURN to tell us. What does this organization (and its benefactors) really want?
The Teachers Union Reform Network (TURN) is at best a superfluous organization that distracts unions from their traditional role: representing all members and (responsibly) protecting seniority rights and tenure.
But what are the “reforms” involved here? Merit pay? Teachers evaluating teachers? Union officials turned into quasi-administrators? Sounds like a good deal –but not for teachers.
Readers of this post should do their own research–look at schools that have adopted the TURN philosophy. Read TURN’s own literature. Do you want this?
I would hope that the ego-stroking (inane comparisons to doctors and lawyers and such–does Danielson have an evaluation system for them?) and promises of shared power would not fool too many teachers.
Teachers, do you think your union (local) needs to be reformed? Reformed by Broad and those who support efforts to destroy public education?
Now, why are the major teacher unions collaborating with these folks? (Please, someone tell us.)
“Collaboration means ‘give me your wristwatch and I will tell you the time.'” a popular saying in in Paris, ca. late 1940, quoted in Ian Ousby’s Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940-1944
Paul F,
If the Supreme Court, with Gorsuch added, favors Janus in his effort to avoid paying union dues, you won’t have unions to kick around anymore.
You are on your own.
Good luck.
So without TURN-style collaboration the unions are doomed? Which is to say that unless unions give up their traditional adversarial role, they will die. Amounts to the same thing, I’d say: the end of teaching as a profession.
By the way, it’s the veteran teachers who are being “kicked around” and kicked out.
I support my state union’s official purpose (as expressed in its constitution). TURN is something else.
I’ll let you know how it TURNs out at my school.
Paul,
That is not what I wrote.
I asked you to specify what you objected to in the TURN statement.
In addition, I pointed out that the Janus case now before the Supreme Court might cut off a substantial source on union funding, allowing people to get benefits without paying dues.
These are two unrelated subjects.
It is not useful to complain without being specific.
My position is simple: You Can’t Do Business with Broad (my apologies to the 1942-3 radio show with a similar title).
Your own writing has helped inform my thinking on this topic.
As for TURN, all that stuff in the report sounds fine– if TURN could swing it without the eviscerating the unions.
Other posters have pointed out that some of the items on the TURN manifesto should be seen as “code” for typical “deformist” goals. I read “recognize as a true profession” as “eliminate seniority and tenure.”
I have no reason to trust this organization.
Perhaps other teachers (career classroom teachers) have had positive experiences with TURN involvement. Let them speak up.
To erase any doubt, I don’t trust Broad or Gates. The groups they create and fund are intent on destroying public schools and the teaching profession.
I support Tenure (due process) and seniority (it is more sensible than evaluating teachers by student test scores).
Thanks, Diane, for the clarification. I hope what is happening at my school is not typical TURN–I can’t yet unfold that tale.
There’s does not seem to be a lot of research on TURN immediately accessible. I found the Poway, CA District’s experience to disturbing, but maybe this is a poor example. With the exception of “Schools Matter,” none of the major anti-reform bloggers seem to have much to say about this topic. Readers can google to this stuff.