Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Why a School Is Not Like a Business

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
7

A reader responds to an earlier post. This reader says that schools are like churches; some say they are like families. As the previous post said, they are built on relationships. When a school closes, a community dies. Those in big corporate cultures don’t understand this. They are used to closing down low-performing units, firing people who aren’t at the top of the stack ranking. This is everyday stuff for them. They don’t understand community. They understand data. They overlook the daily expose of corporate misuse of data (see Enron, WorldComm, LIBOR, or your local business page). If anyone steps forward to defend the community, they will be called “defenders of the status quo.” In the past, they would have been called patriots.

This is so true. Schools operate like churches where individuals work together for the common good. Sharing highs and lows of putting on a school wide musical, laughing and crying together when children earn a scholarship or when children die, brainstorming strategies to help the family of a student who is suddenly homeless. These events create bonds that last a lifetime. Our janitor lost his father, our cafeteria lady lost her husband, our principal’s wife had a baby, our staff and parents showed up at the funeral home and made food for the families. The school needs a new playground. A group of parents donate money and time to build it on weekends. These are people who anticipate a long term (meaning YEARS) relationship with their children’s school. To this day, I receive a birthday card every year from the family of one a student whom I taught 25 years ago. Birthdays are extremely special in her family so I always made time in class for her family to share her birthday with her classmates. If this happened today, we wouldn’t have time, we’d be prepping for tests.
The business community doesn’t want to round out the ramifications of their reforms. Whenever I read of a school shutting down in spite of strong community protests, I feel real pain in my stomach. Education attracts people who have a strong service ethic and who prefer the company of children, not corporate careerists who thrive on competition and risk. Teachers are extremely dedicated to their own professional growth because they view their growth as helping children experience success, not failure. Wouldn’t we want people like this teaching our children? Aren’t these relationships similar to those formed by the elite edu-reformers in their children’s schools? Corporate reforers seem oblivious to their own lived experiences.Teachers are the types of individuals who avoid conflict and work within relationships to build consensus. Corporate reformers live in a milieu of conflict. Their behaviors are classic bullying behaviors- the strong vanquishing the weak, the man subduing the woman- the market rewarding winners and bankrupting losers. Teacher’s good intentions are being exploited. That’s why I take their rhetoric and dumb ideas so personally. That’s why educators should confront them at every turn and on every level and never give up.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

The Trouble with Online Education

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
31

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The New York Times has a terrific piece today with the title of this post, written by a professor at the University of Virginia.

Sure, there are times when it is useful to take a course online.

But there is a downside.

The best learning is what happens when minds rub together, exchanging ideas; when a teacher can gauge what her students understand and can respond to their reactions. The best learning happens when there is a community of learners, thinking together.

I know, I know, this is really old-fashioned. And I’ll plead guilty to having old-fashioned values.

But there is something having the eye-to-eye contact, the face-to-face contact that is really better for purposes of teaching and learning than sitting alone in front of a computer.

I am not saying this to put down technology. I understand how wonderful it is to see visualizations, dramatizations, to see famous people giving famous speeches instead of reading them, to see events rather than reading about them. All of that can be incorporated into lessons.

My gripe is with the very concept that you can learn just as much sitting alone as  you can in a group with a live teacher. It may work with adults (although the author of this article doesn’t think so). But it strikes me as developmentally inappropriate for children.

Categories On-Line Education, Teachers and Teaching

What is a Highly Qualified Teacher?

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2012 //
15

A reader gives her view of what it means to be a “highly qualified teacher,” if not by the elastic definition in NCLB, then by her own knowledge of teaching:

As many have pointed out, no new teachers are “highly qualified.” While some new teachers may be more prepared than others, many years of teaching experience is necessary to become a truly effective (and therefore highly qualified) teacher. So not only are TFA teachers certainly not highly qualified, they are not even very well prepared. While some of them may have strong academic backgrounds and lots of motivation, why is that enough? Shouldn’t we demand that the people who teach our own children not only have strong academic backgrounds, but also strong backgrounds in education? I graduated with a bachelor’s in science from one of the top universities in the country, taught college students there for a year, got my master’s degree in education there (one of the top teacher prep programs), have the benefits and support of three teaching fellowships that constantly push me to be a better teacher, and I still know that, going in to my 3rd year of teaching, while I am doing a good job, I have a long ways to go to be a truly transformational teacher for all of my students. And I want my own children to have nothing less than that. Why is it okay to concentrate inexperienced teachers in high poverty districts when that would not be acceptable elsewhere?
Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

A New Teacher Says He Is Not “Highly Qualified”

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2012 //
4

Dave Reid is an engineer who decided to become a public school teacher after a career of 25 years in the high-tech sector.

He has been blogging about his experiences as a new teacher of math in California.

He sent this comment to add to our discussion of whether five weeks of training is enough to be considered a “highly qualified teacher.”

As a new, second career teacher, I find it amazing that the adverb “highly” is prepended to “qualified” for any teacher with less than ten (10) years experience. What profession designates its rookies and junior staff with the same descriptor as if they were on par with veterans and experts in the field?While I believe select alternate certification programs can be advantageous for second career professionals, and in times where supply cannot meet demand, programs like TFA can help bridge the gap, but blindly believing that youthful passion will save the day is naive, and anointing them “highly qualified” is absurd.I wrote about these descriptors in early 2011 in the following posts.Highly Qualified” Interns – a Mendacious Misnomer:http://mathequality.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/mendacious-misnomer/)Dashboard Delusions – The ED’s Ineffective Measure of Effectiveness:http://mathequality.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/dashboard-delusions/Dave
Categories Alternate Route To Certification, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

A Veteran Teacher Says 5 Weeks Is Not Enough

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
25

A reader states her view of Teach for America’s claim that five weeks of training is enough to make their corps members “highly qualified teachers”:

I graduated college in 1965 with a degree in education.  My first two years were liberal arts and my last two years were education classes focusing on various subjects like social studies, math, reading, etc.  In those days you didn’t need much in the way of classroom management because it was not a major issue.  My third year in college all my education classes required me to visit different schools and observe master teachers who had agreed to allow students to observe them.  We came back to class to reflect on what we saw.  We collected resources.  My last year of college required me to do 4 days a week of student teaching and one day a week in cohort to discuss our experiences.  I worked one semester in a 4th grade class in the lower east side of manhattan and one semester in a kindergarten in park slope brooklyn.  The teachers I worked with were wonderful.  They were helpful and allowed me to assist and also to teach, under their direction, lessons.
None of this, however, prepared me for the experience of having my own class.  It was overwhelming.  It took me a very long time before I thought I was worthy to be a teacher.
There is absolutely no way in the world anyone can be considered “highly qualified” in five weeks.
The suits that don’t understand that are either smoking funny cigarettes, are on someone’s payroll to push this through, or have a complete disdain for other people’s children.  Or all of the above.
I have said many times that those who would consider someone with 5 weeks training to be highly qualified should have major surgery done with someone with 5 weeks medical training.
I told that once to a TFA teacher from a charter school housed in my school building and who had been a finance major at Cornell. She told me it was different because doctors learned real skills.
I think that says it all.

Categories Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

A Dialogue about Teaching

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
9

This is a site to discuss better education for all, so here is a discussion about teaching.

As faithful readers know, we have had a discussion here about the Relay Graduate School of Education and its methods. It trains teachers for charter schools. See here and here and here and here.

Carol Corbett Burris objected to its narrow pedagogy. I objected to the very fact that it is a “graduate school of education” since its faculty includes no scholars, it teaches nothing other than classroom management and data analysis, it offers no courses in the foundations of education, nothing about cognitive psychology or sociology or economics or history, just one way to teach. To my way of thinking, Relay is a teaching program, not a graduate school of education. I would like to hear someone from Relay explain on what grounds they call themselves a “graduate school of education” without scholars or a curriculum. They are more akin to a trade school for charter teachers.

But I digress.

Paul Bruno, who I suppose is from Relay and who occasionally comments on this blog responded to Burris, and she responded to him.

Perhaps you will enjoy the discussion.

Categories Charter Schools, Teachers and Teaching

Are TFA Teachers “Highly Qualified”?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
54

Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post asks a seemingly obvious question:  Should a teacher with only five weeks of training be considered “highly qualified”? The answer is obviously no..

But the question pertains to Teach for America, which has lobbied Congress to make sure that its neophytes are somehow treated as “highly qualified” under the No Child Left Behind act. The federal appeals court in California has twice said that TFA teachers are not highly qualified, and that they should not be concentrated in districts of high poverty and high disadvantage, where children actually need “highly qualified” teachers, not young college graduates with five weeks to training.

Congress is debating the issue, and TFA is exerting its muscle and lobbyists and war chest to make sure that its fresh-faced recruits are dubbed “highly qualified” by any new version of the law. As Strauss says, “Let’s see just how powerful Teach for America is with Congress.”

 

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

A Report from The Netherlands

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
5

We have a tendency in the U.S. to think only of ourselves or to look enviously abroad to wonder what some other nation is doing that we should copy (another way of thinking only of ourselves).

Part of this is national narcissism but also incredible naiveté. As Yong Zhao has written in his books and blogs and articles, we look enviously at the test-driven schools of China at the same time that the Chinese wonder how to be more creative and entrepreneurial like us.

We can always learn from the experiences of other nations. One reader asked the question, what will happen when the “reformers” have passed so many punitive laws that no one will want to teach? A reader in The Netherlands responded:

When schools ‘suffer’ from a shortage, they will hire unqualified ‘teachers’ to fill up the vacancies. They will keep silent about that, and since the government is their best accomplice, they will keep silent about it too.In The Netherlands there is a big shortage of qualified teachers, for about 15 years. Even though we have lowered the qualification norms (you can be a teacher here if you can’t divide 4 by 0,5, or if you believe that the Second World War was some fight between Germans and Americans), still one out of every three secondary teachers is unqualified. Parents don’t know this, pupils don’t know this. It is a fact admitted by the Education Department, but they don’t do anything about it. Their main concern is that ‘someone’ is teaching, whoever it is, and whatever their capability. In short, teaching as a job is sold out by employers and the government.Some context: public education in The Netherlands consist of 99% charter schools and 1% private schools. All schools get an equal sum of money for every student. School boards receive a lumpsum every year; a big bag of money that they can spend any way they like, as long as students make ‘sufficient’ progress. ‘Sufficient’ is not an absolute norm but a relative one: school boards must make sure that their schools don’t get in the bottom 10%. When a school gets in the bottom 10%, directors usually leave the school and get better paid positions at other schools. No one is accountable exept for the ‘interim manager’ who receives a high fee for getting the school on track and in the ‘upper’ 90%.The economic prosperity 1990-2008 has led to a huge expansion of management, consultancy and bureaucracy in education. In contrast, the economic adversity 2008-present has led to increasing class size, canceling of educational programs for deprived children, more teaching hours per teacher, and teachers’ wages being frozen for four years.It seems like employers don’t care that there is a huge shortage of qualified employees. I can’t think of any other profession with such a phenomenon. Just imagine a shortage of medical doctors, lawyers, policemen etc. – and employers silently hiring tens of thousands unqualified people to fill up the vacancies!
Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, International, Teachers and Teaching

Experience Matters

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
4

In my forty years or so of studying the history of American education, I have learned about fads that came and went, disappeared and returned, over the course of the past century, each time treated as an innovation. It demonstrates to me the value of studying the history of education, so as to be aware of why ideas and methods work or don’t work, and to protect children against the latest passing enthusiasm. It strikes me that people who are teaching must find it very distracting to see the mandates come rolling out of the state department of education, or now the federal government, to do what they know is wrong or what is distracting, or to do something that violates their sense of professionalism. Yes, change is important, and yes, change can mean progress. But not always. The wise educator can tell the difference.

A reader answers an earlier post:

In my 16 years of experience, I have seen ideas come and go only to return again when some higher-up at the state DOE thinks that he or she has some kind of innovative approach despite the fact that we’ve tried that method before. Teachers with experience under their belts have an understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in their classrooms. I highly doubt that TFA has some miracle approach on how to teach that will revolutionize the profession.

“Value-added” is another one of those “buzzwords” that reformers like to infuse into the teaching environment. The mere fact that you used the term shows that there is an obvious “superman” mentality in the TFA concept (not just to quote that propaganda of a movie) wherein success is quantifiable in the same way that businesses measure success by profits. Students are not “products”–they’re people as are those who teach them. You cannot put a number on the complexity of teachers’ contributions to the students of our country.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Is This Any Way to Improve the Teaching Profession?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
55

This is President Obama’s vision for reshaping the teaching profession. I certainly agree with the idea that entry into teacher education programs should be selective and rigorous, but almost everything else about the program is odious.

The administration proposes a competitive grant program that would do the following [my comments are in brackets]:

The proposed grant program calls for states and districts to undertake a comprehensive set of five reforms including:

  • Reforming colleges of education and making these schools more selective  [good idea, but today the biggest producers of teaching degrees are online “universities” that have no standards at all so it is hard to know how these  diploma mills might be affected, if at all]
  • Creating new career ladders for teachers to become more effective and ensure their earnings are tied more closely to performance [this is merit pay, the same policy that has failed over and over, tying teachers’ earning to the test scores of students and calling it “performance”]
  • Establishing more leadership roles and responsibilities for teachers, improving professional development, and providing autonomy to teachers in exchange for greater responsibility [no problem here, though I bet many teachers would like to have the autonomy to be freed of the high-stakes testing that NCLB and Race to the Top and Obama’s waivers from NCLB require]
  • Creating evaluation systems based on multiple measures rather than just on test scores [what a joke, just like the “multiple measures” now adopted in state after state where test scores are “only” 40-50% of the teacher’s evaluation but outweigh all the other measures]
  • Reshaping tenure to protect good teachers and promote accountability [in other words, no tenure at all, unless your students get higher test scores every year]
This is the same old test-based accountability of NCLB, with a new wrapper. Will the Obama administration ever look at the research? Might they look at the persistent failure of merit pay? Might they look at the National Research Council’s report on the meager results of test-based accountability? Must they continue to shove testing down everyone’s throat for the next four years?
Hey, I know Romney will be worse. But can’t Obama give us something positive to hope for in another term, some possibility of reforming his ruinous Race to the Top?
Categories Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »