Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
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What a TFA Teacher Learned about Tenure

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2012 //
20

I liked a blog I read this morning. It was written by a TFA teacher who came into teaching with a low opinion of tenure. He (and I think it is a he because of the name of his blog) came into teaching sympathetic to the Michelle Rhee claim that tenure is only for the lazy and that real teachers don’t care about it.

But after three years of teaching, he expected to win tenure. Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration was pressuring principals and superintendents to be parsimonious in granting tenure, so his own tenure was denied for a year. It was denied not because of his teaching (he writes), but because the principal had not done enough observations.

This blog reminds us that it is up to principals to make the tenure decision. Teachers don’t grant themselves tenure. Teachers’ unions don’t grant tenure. Principals grant tenure. If there are “bad” teachers, it is because a principal awarded them tenure.

This blog also reminds us that tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment, as so many in the media and in elected office assume, but a guarantee of due process, a guarantee of a hearing before one can be fired. Hearing the evidence against you before getting fired is not exactly un-American.

It is always a hopeful sign when TFA teachers realize that teaching is a career, not just a stepping stone for Ivy Leaguers who want to win a plum job at a hedge fund or want a fast track to becoming state commissioner of education with minimal experience. It is also a hopeful sign when TFAers recognize that there is a reason for teacher tenure, and it is not about protecting bad teachers.

When there are enough dissident TFA corps members, we will begin to see a real change in the national dialogue as these bright and articulate teachers start talking back to those who put them into the job.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Did Arne Learn Anything in New Haven?

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2012 //
2

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited New Haven’s first turnaround school, he asked what was needed to encourage more teachers to leave high-performing schools for low-performing schools. Everyone who responded to his question talked about the importance of preparing teachers better for the challenges of teaching students in urban schools. They spoke of a year or more of preparation. No one mentioned Teach for America. I wonder if he noticed that.

When he asked the only teacher who had transferred from a high-performing school why she had done so, she said it was because of her desire to serve. And the following exchange ensued:

“No one becomes a teacher to get rich,” she added.

“We’re working on that,” Duncan replied.

Duncan missed the point. She was not lured to the turnaround school to get rich, but he continues to believe that money will be the incentive that brings teachers from top schools to bottom schools. He really doesn’t get it.

What is troubling about the whole article is the underlying assumption that firing half the staff was part of a successful process; that the teachers were the reason that the students had low test scores. Of course, there is no evidence that the school actually has turned around, but that’s irrelevant. The entire day of high-fives reinforced Duncan’s rock-solid belief that firing teachers is a necessary step to turning a school around. He just can’t stop patting himself on the back as he flogs this claim that firing half or all the staff is the essence of reform. In his mind, it is.

He really doesn’t get it.

Diane

Categories Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

Did Albert Shanker Say That?

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2012 //
24

When critics of teachers’ unions want to strike a blow against unions, they throw around something that they claim was said by the late Albert Shanker:

‘When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children.’ ”

Albert Shanker was the brilliant and much-admired and very outspoken president of the American Federation of Teachers; he died in 1997.

Joel Klein, former NYC chancellor who now sells education technology for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, quoted this line in an article in The Atlantic Monthly, and Mitt Romney quoted it when he unveiled his education policy package.

The problem is that no one knows for sure if Albert Shanker actually said these words.

Various efforts to trace the origins of this line have failed to discover whether Shanker ever said it.

It appeared in a small newspaper in Mississippi. Rightwing outlets love to cite it.

But no one can authenticate that Albert Shanker ever said it.

So we can expect that rightwing opponents of teachers’ right to bargain collectively will continue to cite this as fact rather than fancy.

As it happened, I knew Al Shanker very well. The best representation of his beliefs was the sign that New York City teachers carried when they protested or went on strike: “Teachers Want What Children Need.”

Next time someone rails against the unions, remember that teachers’ working conditions are children’s learning conditions.

Diane

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Open Letter to Georgia Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2012 //
6

In my experience, if you want to find a sympathetic ear in the media for public education, find someone who has a relative who teaches. Jon Stewart never fell for the teacher-bashing mania because his mother was a teacher. I have been interviewed on several occasions by talk show hosts who confessed that their mother or father was a teacher. They know how hard teachers work, and they share my outrage at the negative treatment of teachers and public schools today.

Yesterday someone sent me an article by Dick Yarbrough, a columnist in Georgia, thanking teachers for making it through another year. I immediately sensed that he had teachers in the family. Towards the end of his article, he mentions that four members of his family are teachers. That’s why he can’t stomach the absurd claims by legislators that teachers represent a class of overpaid, lazy people who are ripping off the public. Addressing teachers, he writes:

“Your rewards for your efforts are unpaid furlough days, larger class sizes, no pay increases (but increased expenses) and a second-guessing public that seems to feel you should be able to stop all of society’s ills at the classroom door. And then there are the politicians who promote “school choice.” That “choice” doesn’t seem to include making public schools better but it does include making all the other choices more attractive.”

What a pleasure to discover this very supportive open letter to the hard-working teachers of Georgia.

Diane

Categories Georgia, Teachers and Teaching

Thank You, Ms. Katie

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2012 //
3

Earlier this year I saw an article that was so good that I saved it, thinking that some day I would have a chance to write about it. It was a blog by a teacher named Katie Osgood, who teaches students with disabilities in a psychiatric hospital. Her insights were so keen, her description of her students so moving, that I knew that I had to write about this article.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/02/katie_osgood_the_reform_my_stu.html?r=132021561&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS2

Ms. Katie (as she calls herself) described what her students need. Not charter schools, not green TFA teachers, not teachers pushing their students for higher test scores.

What her students need are “caring, committed, EXPERIENCED teachers.”

They need stability.

They need ‘a village.’

They need extra resources.

They need to have their basic needs met.

They need creativity and flexibility.

They need strong peer groups.

What they don’t need is to have policymakers prattling that “poverty doesn’t matter.”

Ms. Katie’s eloquent plea for common-sense solutions stands in stark contrast to today’s education deform policies. She might have just as well have been writing about all the children in the Chicago public schools, or for that matter, students in every school.

She comes up with different answers than policymakers because she is interested in the children she teaches; our policymakers care only about their test scores. We mustn’t forget that children are, above all, getting ready for global competition. Except that they are not. They are children trying to grow up in a cold society. Let them be children. Attend to their needs. Help them become healthy.

I remembered this article last night when I read another blog by Ms. Katie. (Thank you, Twitter.) She had been thinking of teaching in the Chicago public schools, but decided that it was not possible. It was not possible because Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pursuing policies that will harm the children she wants to help. A brief quote:

“I refuse to teach in a school which your appointed Board purposefully starves in order to justify closure and privatization. I cannot watch the savage inequalities of school funding play out in children’s lives.

“I refuse to administer standardized tests to children with special needs over and over and over again. I did that once in a school, and I consider it immoral forcing a child who is having panic attacks, crying, flipping desks in frustration to take a test far above the level we know that child is currently learning. And all for the purpose of judging, sorting, and punishing.

“I refuse to teach the scripted curriculum forced on your teachers. My students need creative, responsive, individualized instruction. Not canned test-prep.

http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2012/04/dear-mr-mayor-why-i-will-not-teach-in.html

As I read Ms. Katie, I wonder why the powerful organizations that sponsor symposia and conferences about how to solve the problems of education seldom invite teachers like her. Instead, they stack their conferences with high-tech gurus, charter school advocates, and business leaders. A few days ago, I was invited to participate in a New York Times-sponsored event to discuss the teacher quality problem. There were no teachers (as yet) invited to speak. I declined. They need Ms. Katie.

Diane

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Tenure Issue Doesn’t Belong in Courts

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2012 //
0

The usual group of corporate reformers, bankrolled by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the Broad Foundation, filed a lawsuit to invalidate teacher tenure and seniority in California. They claim that such protections impair the provision of quality education. Their claim is laughable on its face, since high-performing districts as well as low-performing districts have the same contractual requirements. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0516-lausd-teachers-20120516,0,6292585.story

This is part of an unending assault on any job protections or due process at all for public school teachers, as well as an effort to negate collective bargaining.

Quite remarkably, the Los Angeles Times–no softie for teachers’ unions–blasted the idea of taking the issue to court, as the corporate reformers have done. In its editorial, it says that job protections are too strong, that it should take longer to get tenure, and that there have to be safeguards to permit the dismissal of incompetent teachers. But the editorial smartly argues that these issues should be resolved through collective bargaining, not by a challenge in the courts. If this challenge is sustained, the editorial warns, then every policy issue affecting education will end up in the courts, which is not the appropriate place to reach agreement.

This is a smart editorial: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-tenure-teacher-california-lawsuit-20120516,0,5459914.story

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Teachers and Teaching

The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC?

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
5

Aaron Pallas is one of the most insightful commentators on education in the nation. He teaches at Teachers College and if I were a student there, I would want to study with him. Not only is he smart, he is fearless. His regular columns in the Hechinger Report are “must” reading. His latest is about a teacher who was identified by New York City’s “teacher data reports” as the absolutely worst eighth grade teacher of math in the city. (http://eyeoned.org/content/the-worst-eighth-grade-math-teacher-in-new-york-city_326/).

Pallas shows how her rating has nothing to do with her performance as a teacher. She teaches gifted students and was a victim of her own success. Her students did so well last year that they did not meet the scores that the city’s computers predicted for them this year. But every one of them took and passed the state’s Regents exams.

The teacher, Carolyn Abbott, makes the interesting point in the article that the tests are high-stakes for the teacher, but not for the students. These students are so far advanced beyond the expectations of the state tests that the tests are almost a joke for them. But not for her. She is leaving teaching and going to work on a doctorate and then probably into college teaching.

Pallas writes, quoting Abbott: “I love to teach,” she says. And she loves mathematics. Ultimately, she decided, the mathematics was more important than the teaching, although she envisions teaching mathematics at the college level in the future. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she says. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.”

When will the authorities in New York City and Albany and Washington, D.C., and in state education departments across the nation recognize that they have created a monstrous, counterproductive and utterly harmful means of evaluating teachers? Are they wise enough to recognize the errors of their ways?

Diane

Categories New York, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

The Most Idiotic Reform of the Week

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
10

Can you believe this? A story in the Washington Post reports that kindergarten students in Georgia will be asked to evaluate their teacher’s performance. The five-year-olds’ judgments will help to determine whether their teachers get a bonus or get fired http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/student-surveys-may-help-rate-teachers/2012/05/11/gIQAN78uMU_story.html.

Have we lost our minds in this country? At long last, are we totally insane on the subject of teacher evaluation? I know that the Gates Foundation has encouraged the idea that student surveys should be used to judge teachers, along with test scores and other so-called measures. For what it’s worth, I think it is not a good idea. In college, in high school and in middle school, teachers will be wary of asking too much of their students, for fear of losing their favor. If they assign too much reading or if they are tough graders or disciplinarians, their students might retaliate by giving them a low mark.

If teachers must seek their students’ approval, how does that make school better?

To rely on kindergarten students to judge their teachers brings this idea to its lowest possible level. At what point does a bad idea get revealed as sheer idiocy?

Diane

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Georgia, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

The Failure of Corporate Reform (continued)

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2012 //
1

The current era of school reform has nothing to do with improving education or helping kids and everything to do with imposing business values on schools, specifically, (1) subjecting schools to measurements that distort their goals and (2) privatizing public schools so as to disable the public responsibility for public education.

This project has many tentacles, such as opening privately managed charter schools, evaluating teachers based on the test scores of their students, merit pay, vouchers, etc. It all boils down to the same basic goal: to set unrealistic targets for school performance and to use those metrics to advance privatization.

The corporate reforms fail and fail and fail and fail, and eventually their unending failure will break through to the larger public.

Just yesterday, Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, who has dependably supported the corporate reforms, explained that he no longer believes that it is usefl to evaluate individual teachers by the test scores of their students. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/why-rating-teachers-by-test-scores-wont-work/2012/05/13/gIQAJb5lMU_blog.html). Jay now understands that this doesn’t work. The one-year models don’t work. Family income has a bigger effect on test scores than teachers. He still sort of believes in value-added assessment, because over three years, he thinks, you can identify the best and the worst teachers. But as Jay probably knows, states are hanging single-number ratings around the necks of teachers that discourage all teachers, including the very best ones. Teachers feel demeaned when all their hard work turned into a number based on their students’ test scores.

Note to Jay: No other nation in the world is evaluating their teachers by the test scores of their students. Not in the short run and not in the long run. Other nations have education systems led by educators, not politicians and businessmen. They understand that test scores reflect the students’ efforts, as mediated by many influences, such as the resources of the school, family income, and the many teachers with whom the students have interacted. It’s tough to disentangle those influences and pin them on one teacher. Teachers know that. Businessmen and politicians don’t.

I hope Jay has read the reports of the Metlife Survey of the American Teacher and the Scholastic-Gates report on what teachers want. They express profound disregard for the numbers that reformers hold dear. How will we replace the hundreds of thousands of teachers who feel contempt, rather than respect? Jay is absolutely right at the end of his column when he writes about the importance of teamwork. Teachers don’t see themselves in competition with the teacher in the next class; they think they are on the same team, working towards common goals. Not higher test scores, but better educated students, more independent persons, more thoughtful citizens. Measure that.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Teachers and Teaching

Release the Tests

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
8

A parent recently wrote an article in the New York Times explaining why he planned to file a Freedom of Information Act suit to demand the release of all test questions.

He is right. Now that the tests have assumed so much importance, the public has a right to know what they were asked.

Now that the tests have such a decisive effect on so many people’s lives, the public has a right to know.

Based on these tests, students will be promoted or will fail.

Based on these tests, students will get into the college of their choice, or will not.

Based on these tests, some teachers will get a bonus, and others will be fired.

Based on these tests, some schools will be closed.

Based on these tests, lives will be changed for better or worse.

Who pays for the tests? The public.

Who is affected by the tests? The public.

Who has a right to know what was asked? The public.

Who has a right to know how many pineapples are on the test? The public.

Who has a right to know how many questions are stupid? The public.

Who has a right to know if there are questions with multiple answers or no answer? The public.

If a person accused of a crime has a right to confront their accuser and hear the evidence, why shouldn’t test-takers have the right to know whether the tests that shaped their fate are reasonable?

Publish them. Let everyone see what is on them. Publishers can write new test questions or they can create a database of released test questions so large that students can dip into them for test preparation.

Or, someday we may regain our wits, and decide to move on to far better forms of assessment, where students actually demonstrate what they know and can do instead of picking a bubble.

Unless, of course, we have become so dumbed down by decades of bubble testing that we can no longer think differently.

Diane

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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