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EduShyster: Barbara Madeloni, New President of MTA, Says It is Time to Fight Back

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2014 //
24

EduShyster interviews Barbara Madeloni, the recently elected president of the 110,000 member Massachusetts Teachers Association, and she warns that we either fight for public education or we will lose it.

A former high school teacher, Madeloni was teaching teachers at the University of Massachusetts-Amerst, and she and her students refused to participate in edTPA. As she puts it, “The students with whom I was working didn’t want to submit videos of themselves teaching to Pearson. They didn’t want their work as student teachers to be reduced to a number on a rubric by people who didn’t know them, and 67 of 68 students ultimately refused to send their work.” Madeloni told the story to Michael Winerip of the New York Times; ten days after his story appeared, she was fired. (Winerip, a superb education writer, was later reassigned to cover “Boomers,” and the Times eliminated its weekly education column. Winerip rattled cages every Monday.)

Edushyster asks Madeloni what we can do to fight back against the reformers attacking teachers and public education.

Madeloni responds:

“I think fighting is winning. In a union where members are truly engaged and active, we’re talking to one another about what’s happening, informing each other and making decisions about how we can fight back. The degree to which we’ve been told that our members are unwilling to be active is astonishing to me. If you alienate the membership by continually telling them that things are bad but they could be worse, so we’re going to get behind the bad thing, of course people aren’t going to be active. If we say to members—*We can be powerful. We can use our power. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard. But history shows that we can do this,*—the reaction is completely different because you’re talking about things that really matter to them. And by the way, our members understand that the attacks on them and on public education are coming from both political parties.”

There’s lots more to enjoy. This is a scintillating interview. Keep your eye on Barbara Madeloni. Just think: Massachusetts is the most successful state in the nation by conventional measures like test scores, but even there, teachers, their unions, and public schools are under attack by the usual crowd.

Categories Massachusetts, Resistance, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Reading Professor Responds to NCTQ Blast at Her Post

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2014 //
30

Katherine Crawford-Garrett, a literacy professor at the University of New Mexico,wrote on this blog about how the rating system used by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) affected her own ability to assign readings; her dean warned her that her syllabus might offend them. After her post appeared, it was criticized by Arthur McKee, who directed the NCTQ review of teacher preparation institutions. He ridiculed Crawford-Garrett for ignoring “the science of reading.”

This is Crawford-Garrett’s response to McKee.

Dear Dr. McKee,

I just read your response to the blog entry I posted on Diane Ravitch’s website earlier this week. I interpret your response to mean that you are, perhaps, paying attention to the onslaught of critique your organization is receiving.

I decided to reply in the interest of exposing yet another layer of inaccuracies put forth by NCTQ about the teaching of reading.

I wonder, Dr. McKee, what you are actually referring to when you mention “the science of reading”? I suspect it has something to do with the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, which was released over a decade ago, relied on an extremely limited number of studies to substantiate its claims, has been critiqued widely and led directly to the Reading First debacle during the George W. Bush administration. I have spent countless hours in kindergarten classrooms in urban Philadelphia that rely on the “scientific approach” to reading instruction recommended by the NRP. In most of these classrooms there were no children’s books but plenty of phonics workbooks featuring decodable texts. Are these children learning to decode? Maybe. They were certainly learning to sit still and be quiet and also learning that reading had no relevance to their lives. This is injustice, Mr. McKee. I have never seen a kindergarten class in a wealthy area employ this “scientific approach” to reading instruction. Not once.

I also wonder, Dr. McKee, whether you make it a point to read any of the top journals in the field of reading research including Reading Research Quarterly or the Journal of Literacy Research? Or whether you have read the policy statement issued by the Literacy Research Association that deems NCTQ’s textbook list “damaging to teachers and children”? There is a wealth of peer-reviewed research in my field, Dr. McKee. As an expert in that field, I am quite familiar with it. I suggest if you are going to continue to make pronouncements about the “best ways to teach reading” that you familiarize yourself with it as well.

Before becoming a literacy professor, I taught at an innovative, arts-focused charter school in Washington, DC. We consistently had some of the highest literacy scores in the city, and we did it all without relying on corporate, scripted programs to teach our students to read. Instead, we read real books and wrote real documents that were often sent to public officials or used in other authentic capacities. This is high-stakes accountability in the field of literacy- when reading and writing matters in the world.

Now, I know one of your primary concerns, Dr. McKee is whether I teach phonics in my reading methods class. I assure you that I do (it’s even featured quite prominently on my syllabus). Code-breaking is a fundamental aspect of learning to read. However, these skills mean very little outside a framework of meaning-making. If students don’t have a purpose for decoding a text, then why on earth would they do it?

Contrary to the claim you make on your blog, I do teach vocabulary and fluency in my classes- they just happen not to be listed as headings on my syllabus partly because it feels artificial to separate them out from other parts of the reading process.

This is the fundamental flaw in your organization, Dr. McKee. You make assumptions based on a piece of paper. You have not seen my classroom and you do not know about the opportunities and challenges we face in New Mexico or how literacy operates in a culturally and linguistically diverse community. The primary assignment in my reading class – the class NCTQ deemed “unacceptable” – requires students to study a child’s literacy practices through extensive observation, multifaceted assessments and consultation with their cooperating teachers. They then design an instructional plan to improve that child’s reading abilities. Students have reported to me time and again how helpful and generative this assignment is. But perhaps I should replace it with “quizzes” to increase the “rigor” of my class as your organization suggests.

I may not win this battle, Dr. McKee, but I’m not going to stop fighting it. I will continue to do everything I can to protest my institution’s involvement with your organization. In the meantime, please feel free to visit my classroom. I have a feeling you might learn something.

Sincerely,

Katherine Crawford-Garrett

Categories National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teachers and Teaching

CCSS Writer Blasts CC Basic Reading Standards

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2014 //
118

Dr. Louisa Moats was part of the team that wrote the foundational reading standards for the Common Core. In “Psychology Today,” she strongly criticized the standards.

Among other things, she said:

“I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.

“Our lofty standards are appropriate for the most academically able, but what are we going to do for the huge numbers of kids that are going to “fail” the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test? We need to create a wide range of educational choices and pathways to high school graduation, employment, and citizenship. The Europeans got this right a long time ago.

“If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training. Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved! “

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: What Is “Whole Brain Teaching?”

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2014 //
53

Yesterday I posted a clip of students at Nashville Prep chanting the answers to questions. I should have mentioned that chanting the answers to questions was a common practice in mid-nineteenth century schools. Students would chant their geography lessons, for example, singing out the names of continents or mountains or oceans. They did not necessarily knew where to find them on a map, but they knew the words to the chant.

Peter Greene reports that this chanting is today called “whole brain teaching,” and is associated with someone named Chris Biffle.

Greene says that WBT has a website, and its goal is to put “organized fun” into the classroom.

But he takes a dim view of this chanting:

“Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you– given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT’s persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you’ve always struggled with classroom management, or if you’re Dolores Umbridge.

“All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you’re told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.

“But in a funny twist, per Ravitch’s post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.

“So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stakes standardized testing call for.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Alan Singer Responds to Supporters of edTPA

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2014 //
3

Alan Singer of Hostra University in New York wrote a critique of edTPA, a new assessment of student teachers, which was posted here. He called it “The Big Lie Behind High Stakes Testing of Student Teachers.”

A group of faculty at the City University of New York wrote to explain why they support edTPA, and it was posted here.

In a new article, Alan Singer writes that “edTPA is currently being implemented in a number of states through a partnership of SCALE (the Stanford University Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity), the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), and the publishing and testing mega-giant Pearson Education. About the same time, SCALE released “edTPA MYTHS and FACTS,” which responded to critics of edTPA and purports to set the “record straight.”

In his comments here, Singer points out that the supporters of edTPA are a small fraction of the CUNY faculty, and he challenges their defense of edTPA.

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Shaun Johnson: What’s Behind the Attack on Tenure?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2014 //
54

Shaun Johnson, an elementary school teacher, explains the attack on tenure and details what reformers would do of they really cared about teachers or children or the quality of education.

He writes:

“Obsessions with teacher tenure, or tenure in any academic profession, is all about union busting, and flipping the teaching profession into an unprofessional, short-term, part-time, scab workforce. It’s also about taking control of a largely “feminized” profession, one that few in the education policy community actually understand. That frightens them.

“Eliminating teacher tenure is education reform on the cheap. It’s a low-cost, no frills, low-brow maneuver. It rearranges the deck chairs without doing anything to the ship. Eliminating tenure shuffles control over who gets to teach, and nothing else. No prior or future investment necessary.”

He lists what teachers and children really need. Read it. It is focused and clear.

“Until then, don’t get cheap on me/us.

“Don’t be cheap with students.

“Until these glaring deficiencies are mitigated, not one single teacher is going to take VAM, testing, merit pay, or any other such nonsense seriously. There will be no buy-in, and all you’ll meet is either outright resistance or malaise. Every time you enter a school or classroom, or invite teachers for professional developments, all you’ll meet dear reformer are folks who check their email when you’re talking, who roll their eyes with every sentence you speak. You’ll meet those who smile and accept your free totes, and then talk viciously behind your back.”

Categories Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

EduShyster on “Knowledge Ventriloquism”

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2014 //
5

EduShyster here interviews Ken Zeichner of the University of Washington about teacher education.

They talk about the NCTQ report, whose findings were predetermined by its political agenda (I.e., university-based teacher preparation bad, alternative preparation good).

Zeichner says that no other country–certainly no high-performing country–has gone full-throttle for alternative teacher preparation.

He describes a phenomenon that he calls “knowledge ventriloquism:”

“Basically what you have is an echo chamber effect where think tanks and other advocacy groups just keep repeating each other’s claims until they become true. There’s a research component too, except that the research isn’t independent. In fact, you can usually predict what the findings are going to be be based on who is doing the research. Cherry picking is another essential component of *knowledge ventriloquism.* Advocates a particular position or program will selectively choose certain findings and ignore others. The problem is that by the time any of this reaches the mainstream media and the headlines, any nuance or complexity is lost.”

In another era, this was known as the Big Lie, repeated again and again in authoritative circles until the public assumed it must be true despite the lack of evidence.

Zeichner and colleagues recently published a study of the movement to privatize teacher education. The NCTQ ratings are a part of that movement.

Categories Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

David Sudmeier: USA Today Permits Hate Speech

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2014 //
63

David Sudmeier accurately portrays the vile advertisement in USA Today as hate speech directed against teachers. He posted this commentary on the blog.

The Crucible

Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible survives to this day as a metaphor for accusations without merit that damage reputations and lives. The advertisement that appeared in USA Today after the Vergara decision contained such an accusation, which might as well have been of witchcraft and evil spells cast upon students by malevolent kindergarten teachers. The same organization that created that ad had another rejected by the Chicago Tribune, because it conflated teacher unionism with racist segregationist attitudes a la George Wallace. Teachers can likely expect a continued barrage of similar ads in the media, funded by privatization interests.

Maintaining a sense of dignity depends on the deference and support shown to you by society in light of your contributions. When major media publications accept ads portraying student feet protruding from a garbage can, and accuse teachers of placing students in that demeaning position, they accept hate speech as a legitimate source of income. Teacher sensitivity to outright lies is less a product of being targeted for criticism—that’s part of life in the public sector— than it is due to the duplicity of the bad actors that create those lies. They demonize teachers on the one hand and extend the other for profits to be earned by displacing unionized teachers with ill-trained, easily controlled dupes working in charter schools, among their many crimes. The “Center for Union Lies” does not criticize teachers; it intentionally distorts and mischaracterizes their achievements to enable corporate gain.

When you deprive teachers of dignity and meaning in their work, you strike a blow against public education. Of course, that is exactly the point for some. For others, it is “collateral damage” that must be accepted to improve instruction and raise test scores. If test scores rise, then education must be improved. If living and breathing teachers who will demand immediate compensation can be replaced with technology that raises test scores on tests written by testing companies whose shareholders seek short-term profits…well, all the better.

What is lost if public education is lost? Just as terrorism is a front in the war for the soul of Islam, attacks on public education—one of the sources of our common good— constitute one front in the war for the soul of democracy. Democracy can withstand challenges from without which are obvious and overt; whether democracy can withstand challenges from within is unknown. Dismantling public institutions encourages individualism and loss of community. That loss of community opens a democracy to manipulation and exploitation by powerful corporations.

Still, we teachers as a group fail to see the forest for the trees. We imagine that what we experience in the form of attacks by individuals and organizations on teachers and education is somehow unique and unrelated to other events. We feel our institution being assailed, and we forget that there are others in the public service enduring similar mistreatment.

How have we ended up in this situation? Corporatists have built a myth of excellence and efficiency in the private sector, and a specter of malfeasance and incompetence in public institutions. Their tactics include attacks on public institutions, accompanied by demands for firings and accountability measures. They then demand new “standards” for performance that are clearly impossible to reach, and place blame on those same institutions when they fail to attain them and attempt to cover it up. Finally, they seek to withdraw financial support from those institutions, citing the failures they themselves engineered. This has happened in education with NCLB and RttT, and will occur with CCSS, if it is not more widely abandoned. It has happened as well with the Veterans Administration. The VA (underfunded and overwhelmed by demands resulting from the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle) was accused of not providing timely care for those who deserved better. The solution? A standard was set that could not be met, a 14-day window for care, and accountability measures for not achieving success. When that couldn’t be accomplished, managers found ways of lying to make it appear that things were fine. Uncovered, the VA was again blamed for incompetence. Calls were made to privatize an institution that attempts to fulfill a public obligation to those who have stood in the line of fire for us all.

We teachers can easily comprehend what VA employees face. Our experiences are not unique; they are part and parcel of a wider attack on democracy. The sooner we accept that and coordinate our actions with other institutions that are also suffering, the sooner we will begin to turn the corner. We become powerful when we recognize our community, and weak when we abandon it. Badass Teachers know what it means to acquire community; we need to remind our colleagues of the role their unions need to play in preserving, protecting, and extending that community of public service employees. NEA and AFT have accomplished much in the past, but are only lately stepping up to the plate on this issue. They can do much more, and will need grass roots support to do so.

We are not just educators. We are warriors for democracy, and we fight a dangerous opponent. We fight for free, fair, and appropriate public education, just as our brothers and sisters fight battles for better public health care, better public transportation, and improved public security. Part of our fight is to act with dignity and demand dignified treatment from society. We need to build a new myth of the public employee, one that recognizes our commitment to service and champions our achievements in creating community.

Arthur Miller is calling to us now.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: North Carolina Has the Worst Legislature in the Nation

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2014 //
57

Peter Greene has scoured the nation to determine which state legislature is most hostile to teachers. Here he explains why North Carolina wins that dubious title.

He begins:

“There are several state legislatures that are working hard to earn the “Worst Legislature in America” medal. Florida, where it’s cool to use terminally ill children as political tools and their families as punching bags, has always been a strong contender. New York State staked its claim by taking the extraordinary measure of overruling local government because they didn’t like its decision. Several states have worked to promote the teaching profession by stripping it of any professional trappings like decent pay and job security.

“But when it comes to suck, North Carolina is a tough state to beat.

“The legislature tried to make tenure go away entirely, but was frustrated to discover that they could not legally revoke tenure for people who already had it. But the wily legislators realized that they had a unique piece of leverage in a state where teachers’ real-dollar wages have dropped every year for seven years.

“The proposal is simple. NC teachers can have a raise, or they can have job security. They cannot have both.

“They may have a raise. And who knows. Some day they might get another one. But they can also be fired for being too expensive. Or they can have job security, but Senate Leader Phil Berger warns that they will probably never see another raise again.

“The message is as clear as it is simple:

“North Carolina legislators do not want teaching to be a career in their state.

“If you want to devote your career, your lifetime of work, to teaching, you cannot do it in North Carolina.”

Categories North Carolina, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: A Catalogue of Anti-Teacher Trolls on the Internet

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2014 //
60

Peter Greene observes that the Vergara decision has brought out a deluge of comments by anti-teacher trolls.

 

Read any article on the Internet about the decision, and it will be followed by an outpouring of vitriol towards teachers.

 

It is useful to read Greene’s classification of the teacher-haters. You will encounter them almost everywhere.

 

What accounts for teacher hatred? Maybe these are the people who got an F in school and never got over it. These are the people who don’t have a pension and think that no one should. These are the people who think that America can get by without teachers or think that teachers should work for free.

 

But Peter does it so much better. Here are a few of his troll categories of teacher-haters:

 

Sad Bitter Memories Troll

I hated high school. My teachers were mean to me. I remember a couple who picked on me all the time just because I didn’t do my work and slept in class a lot. And boy, they did a crappy job of teaching me anything. I sat in their classroom like a houseplant at least three days a week, and I didn’t learn a thing. Boy, did they suck! Crappy teachers like that ought to be fired immediately! And that principal who yelled at me for setting fire to the library? That guy never liked me. Fire ’em all.

 

Unlikely Anecdote Troll

There was this one teacher in the town just over from where I went to school, and one day he brought in a nine millimeter machine gun and mowed down every kid in his first three classes. The principal was going to fire him, but the union said he couldn’t because of tenure, so that guy just kept working there. They even put kids in his class who were related to the ones he shot. Tenure has to be made illegal right away.

 

Just Plain Wrong Troll

Tenure actually guarantees teachers a job for life, and then for thirty years after they retire and fifty years after they die. It’s true. Once you get hired as a teacher you are guaranteed a paycheck with benefits for the next 150 years.

 

Confused Baloney Troll

If you really care about children and educational excellence, then you want to see teachers slapped down. The only way to foster excellence in education is by beating teachers down so they know their place. Only by beating everyone in the bucket can we get the cream to rise to the top.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Humor, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching
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