If I had read this article, I would not have been surprised to learn that Bill Cosby joined the board of StudentsFirst.
I wonder if anyone told him that when Michelle Rhee left DC, it had the biggest black-white achievement gap of any urban district tested by NAEP. Like double the gap in other districts. Same for Hispanic-white gap.
Sad.
Read this glowing report about how TFA alums have taken over leadership roles across Indiana, with 11 working in the State Education Department.
This is a state where the Republican Governor and Legislature have passed voucher legislation, encouraged the proliferation of charter schools, and welcomed for-profit schooling. It is the full rightwing agenda, exceeded perhaps in scope and ambition only by Bobby Jindal’s privatization agenda (which is led by TFA alum John White).
Near the end of the article, the reporter finds an experienced educator or two to wonder whether five weeks of training is sufficient, but the rest of the piece glows with adulation for the kids who are reshaping the state along the lines of corporate-style reform.
The New York City Department of Education decided to kill John Dewey High School in Brooklyn a few years ago. John Dewey (ironic name, no?) had long been considered one of the city’s best non-selective high schools.
When the city began creating small schools and closing large schools, it had to find a place to dump low-performing students so that the small schools would appear successful. So John Dewey became a dumping ground for students unwanted by the new small high schools, which the Bloomberg administration treated as the jewel in its crown.
The teachers fought to protect the school, but it was a losing battle. In this article, read how the city has stripped the school of AP courses, electives, foreign languages, etc., and the graduation rate dropped. As the school was picked apart, enrollment fell, and teachers were laid off. This is a death spiral created by the NYC Department of Education. This year’s school opening was marked by scheduling confusion, not only at Dewey, but other so-called “turnaround” schools that are locked in a legal battle over when and if they will get the “turnaround” treatment (meaning, will the staff be fired and the school closed).
It is a war of attrition, and the administration will win.
Next time you hear a story about the “success” of New York City’s small high schools, remember John Dewey High School.
This blogger wondered who was appointed to the Florida state board. This is a powerful board that selects the state commissioner of education and sets policy for the children, teachers, and schools of the state. The board has given the green light to charters, vouchers, online schools, for-profit schools, any alternative that anyone can dream of.
Who are these people? Read the post and you will understand.
Read it and you will see how Florida became a Mecca for privatization.
Alex Kotlowitz asks this important question in the New York Times on Sunday.
The question is important for several reasons.
First, because the self-proclaimed reformers assert that great teachers can and do overcome poverty. You might say that this slogan is their anti-poverty program. Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan have all said on many occasions that if there is a “great” teacher in every classroom, that will take care of poverty. Or, in a variation, fix the schools first, then fix poverty.
They never explain how a great teacher overcomes homelessness, hunger, poor health, and other conditions associated with poverty. Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965 that you can’t put two people in a race at the same starting line and assume it’s a fair race if one of them is shackled. LBJ knew then what the reformers today never learned.*
Second, it’s heartening to see this article in the New York Times because the Times has been hostile to teachers and their unions on the editorial page. The Times is no friend of public education. Its editorial writer thinks that teachers need carrots and sticks to raise test scores, indifferent to the consistent failure of such policies.
How nice to see Alex Kotlowitz in the pages of the Times.
*At Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “Imagine a hundred-yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards, while the unshackled runner has gone fifty yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap, or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action toward equality.”
Commencement Address at Howard University (June 4, 1965)
Amanda Ripley, who usually writes pro-corporate reform articles in TIME, has an article in the Wall Street Journal about how teachers in other nations embrace “reform.”
Her first example is Finland.
That is a curious example for a devotee of today’s carrot-and-stick reforms because Finland would never permit a teacher with five weeks of training to teach. As she notes, they must complete a rigorous four-year college program PLUS a master’s degree. There is no “Teach for Finland.”
Furthermore, there is NO standardized testing in Finland. Ripley doesn’t mention that.
And teachers are not evaluated by the test scores of their students, because there are no student scores.
Also, as I saw when I visited several schools in Finland, the classes are small. About 15-19 in elementary schools, in the low-to-mid 20s in the other grades. And the elementary schools are saturated with services for children that need extra help.
What’s the lesson? How can we get to be more like Finland? After all, Finland borrowed most of its pedagogical philosophy from John Dewey.
LIFE & CULTURE
September 14, 2012, 6:29 p.m. ET
Training Teachers to Embrace Reform
Chicago-style war with unions is the past. Here’s how Finland and Ontario found a new way forward
By AMANDA RIPLEY
Making sense of the Chicago teachers’ strike (where the two sides were reportedly moving toward resolution on Friday) is like trying to understand the failure of a friend’s marriage. You can’t help speculating about who’s to blame, but you’ll never really know. In truth, it doesn’t matter. Many countries have revolutionized their education systems in recent years, but not one of them has done it through strikes, walkouts or righteous indignation.
Just about every country in the developed world has a teachers’ union, so the mere presence of a union doesn’t determine the quality of a country’s schools. There is, however, a significant relationship between the professionalism of the union and the health of an education system. The all-important issue is not how easy it is to fire the worst teachers; it’s how to elevate the entire craft without going to war with teachers.
Striking Chicago public school teachers on Friday picket outside Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago.
That’s where other countries can show us a better way. Working with unions doesn’t mean turning into Mexico, where the education system has been gifted to the union in exchange for political favors—and teenagers perform at the bottom of the world in math and reading. In a few countries, politicians and union leaders have managed not only to raise expectations but to get teachers to drink from the same punch bowl as reformers.
In Finland in the 1970s, teachers had to use special diaries to record what they taught each hour. Government inspectors made sure that a rigorous national curriculum was being followed. Teachers and principals weren’t trusted to act on their own.
At the same time, however, the government began to inject professionalism into the system. The Finns shut down the middling teacher-training schools that dotted the rural landscape and moved teacher preparation into the elite universities, where only the top echelon of high-school graduates could study (something the U.S. has never attempted). Opponents said the changes were elitist, but the reformers insisted that the country had to invest in education to survive economically. Once teachers-to-be got into the universities, they were required to master their subject matter and to spend long stretches practicing in high-performing public schools.
In the 1980s and ’90s, with higher standards and more rigorous teacher training in place, the reformers injected trust. They lifted mandates and asked the teachers themselves to design a new, smarter national curriculum. Today, Finland’s teenagers score at the top of the world on international tests.
If Finland feels too remote to serve as a model for the U.S., consider Ontario, Canada. After years of labor strife in the 1990s, a new provincial premier was elected in 2003. Dalton McGuinty chose Gerard Kennedy, a critic of the old regime, as his education minister. He spent months in school cafeterias, principals’ offices and parent meetings before the negotiations began. “You couldn’t wait until you were at the bargaining table,” explains Benjamin Levin, the former deputy minister. When it came time to negotiate a new teachers’ contract in 2005, Mr. Kennedy harangued the bargainers and kept them at the table all night on more than one occasion—deflecting the distractions that normally dominate such talks—until he finally got an agreement.
The plan that emerged put pressure on Ontario’s schools to improve results and also offered more help to educators. This worked in part because Canada already had fairly rigorous and selective education colleges, so teachers had the skills to adapt to these changes. And by giving in to teachers’ requests for smaller elementary-class sizes, politicians bought themselves enormous good will.
The system in Ontario became “a virtuous circle,” says Marc Tucker, author of “Surpassing Shanghai,” a book about top-performing education systems. “When the young people came out of their training programs, they were damn good teachers. Because of that, they were able to raise public and political confidence—and when that happened, it made it possible for them to get higher salaries and even higher quality recruits into teaching.”
For the past decade, there has been a détente in labor relations in Ontario. Despite a diverse population of students, a quarter of whom were immigrants, the province’s high-school graduation rate rose from 68% to 82%. Teacher turnover also declined dramatically. In 2009, Ontario was one of the few places in the world (aside from Finland) where 15-year-olds scored very high on international tests regardless of their socioeconomic background.
Interestingly, Ontario had its own labor flare-up this week—over a proposed wage freeze and a law that could limit strikes. But coming after years of relative harmony, the response has been reasonable so far. The union urged members to temporarily stop coaching sports and limit other voluntary activities. The situation could deteriorate, but for now, the tone in Ontario is revealing.
What happened in Chicago is about more than just Chicago. It’s about the deeper problem of transforming America’s schools. For too long our education reformers have tried to create a professional teaching corps from the top down, and union leaders have fought to maintain an untenable system. Both sides need to enter the 21st century.
—Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of a forthcoming book about life in the smartest countries in the world.
Listen to a good panel discussion, featuring Joanne Barkan of Dissent. She wrote the great article “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.”
This post is very provocative. It may or may not have relevance to the readers of this blog, because so much of it refers to a British context and pertains to higher education. But what is relevant is the discussion of the conflict between democracy and free market efficiency.
As I read it, I thought about the argument for mayoral control: “It may mean giving up democracy, but it is more efficient.” Look to Cleveland, Chicago and New York City, and what you see is that democracy has been abolished with no increase in efficiency or effectiveness. What we have instead is one-man control, no-bid contracts, school closings, indifference to the views of constituents, and no improvement in educational quality.
Here is the heart of the matter:
…the nub of the matter is captured by his analogy with democracy — “the worst system except for all the others”. The ‘problem’ with democracy (as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore might have put it) is that it’s inefficient. Much simpler, cheaper and more efficient to have a benevolent dictator (like Mr Lee and his successors). Likewise, our justice system is mightily ‘inefficient’ — all those lawyers, trials, juries, assumption of innocence until proved guilty, etc. Much simpler to be able to lock up baddies on the say-so of a senior policeman.
But in both cases we tolerate the inefficiencies because we value other things more highly: political liberty and freedom of expression in the case of democracy; the belief that a system of justice should be open, impartial and fair in the case of our court system.
Like democracy, public universities are also ‘inefficient’ — often, in my experience, woefully so. And only some of that inefficiency can be defended in terms of academic freedoms; much of it is down to the way university culture has evolved, the expectations of academic staff, poor management (rather than enlightened administration), and so on — things that could be fixed without undermining the really important values embodied by the idea of a university. The advent of serious tuition fees in English universities will have the effect of highlighting some of the more egregious deficiencies — poor (or at best uneven) teaching quality, little pastoral care, archaic pedagogical methods, etc. But any attempt to remedy these problems is likely to be seen as interference with cherished academic freedoms, and resisted accordingly. Already, however, students are beginning to ask questions: why, for example, should they pay £9,000 a year for crowded lectures, ‘tutorial groups’ of 50 or more, zero pastoral care and — in some cases — lousy social facilities? Why should complaints about the crass incompetence of a particular lecturer be ignored by the Head of his department? (These are gripes I’ve heard from students recently, though not at my university.)
The problem isn’t helped by the crass insensitivity of many of the new ‘managers’ in UK universities — people who may know how to run a business but haven’t the faintest idea of how to run a university. There’s no reason in principle, though, why one cannot have universities that, on the one hand, function as liberal, critical institutions which cherish and protect freedom of thought and inquiry while at the same time providing excellent ‘customer service’ to their paying students.
I received an email from a parent who is also an educator in Chicago. She wondered about the identity of a group called Education Reform Now, which placed ads in the local media undermining the teachers’ strike. ERN is part of a group called Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers who support charter schools, privatization, and using test scores to evaluate teachers. It is interesting that the charter schools they promote are often (depending on state law) exempt from test-based evaluation. Oh, and 88% of all charters are non-union.
She writes:
Greetings Ms. Ravitch,
I write this letter to you with both excitement and disappointment in my heart. I am sure you are well aware of by now of the strike/battle over the fate of our children and public education that is currently taking place between the Chicago Teachers Union and the City of Chicago. I write this letter not as an educator, but as a parent with children in the public school system here in the city who is infuriated that my children, other children and tax paying citizens are having their civil rights infringed upon through the bullying tactics of our mayor, CPS and big business moguls of this country.
I have been extremely active in the process of fighting against the unfunded longer school day put upon us by the mayor, fighting for an elected representative school board and now walking the picket lines and taking information to the streets and the people regarding the issues that the union is truly bargaining for for our students and teachers. My children have been in the streets along side me as well. I have utilized this opportunity as a teaching moment because I understand the importance of teaching our children, our future, true democracy in action.
My excitement comes from not just the part I play in the process, but more importantly the role and witnessing of the process by children. We talk about the importance of providing a comprehensive education to our children and that we are a “democratic society”; but based on what I am witnessing now brings me to what has has me disappointed and incensed.
Yesterday I watched a television ad paid for by Education Reform Now Advocacy that ran on our local ABC station channel 7. The ad blared carefully selected quotes taken from stories in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune against the union, the teachers and the strike. It ends with the narrator quoting from the Sun-Times that “a deal is within reach, all CTU has to do is grab it”.
The content from both media outlets is based off of mis-information that is simply not true. This is a strike that is, in fact, long over due. Contrary to what the city wants everyone to believe, this is a strike to take back the fate and control of our children’s education. The city and big business are combining efforts and dollars to dismantle the union, and to pit parents and communities against teachers and our children so that they can continue to create standardized testing factories. They aim to turn our students into consumers of a privatized, on-line product that produces data and dollars so that the rich can continue to become richer.
This is both disgraceful and disrespectful and therefore, I am making a plea to you to support our union, our children and the people of Chicago by helping to shed light and expose the bullying tactics of big business in their continued attempt to dismantle unions and privatize education in this country during the time of our fight.
Thank you in advance for your attention and support! Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.
In Solidarity,
Tonya Payne
Parent/Educator
Marcus Winters recommends using value-added assessment to get rid of “ineffective” teachers. His paper was published by the conservative Manhattan Institute, which regularly issues his and others’ critiques of unions, tenure, seniority and any kind of job protection for teachers.
Many studies–and practical experience–have demonstrated that value-added assessment is unstable, unreliable and inaccurate. A teacher with a high rating may have a low rating the next year. The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association published a joint paper warning that VAA says more about which students are assigned to the class than about teacher quality.
And then there is the problem that there is no district that has been able to demonstrate that VAA actually identifies ineffective or effective teachers. When New York City published its value-added ratings, the allegedly “worst” teacher in the city taught immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class as they learned English. As Linda Darling-Hammond and others have warned, value-added assessment will encourage teachers to shun the students with the highest needs and gifted students. Neither will produce the expected gains.
It is interesting and curious that Arne Duncan’s favorite innovation happens to be the favorite solution of the right to find and fire “ineffective” teachers.
I will never understand why the rightwingers are so devoted to high-stakes testing, which is known to produce narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, gaming the system, and cheating. What’s to like? Maybe they like it because it gives them a club with which to bash teachers, their unions, and public education.
