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George Joseph: Exposé of Trafficking in Teachers

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2014 //
46

This is an amazing story, written by investigative reporter George Joseph. It seems there are recruitment agencies that go to other nations, the Philippines especially, hire good teachers, charge outrageous placement fees, and send them to work in American schools.

He writes:

“Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse.

“According to court documents, Lourdes Navarro, chief recruiter and head of Universal Placement, made applicants pay a whopping $12,550 in interview and “processing fees” before they’d even left the Philippines. But the exploitation didn’t stop there. Immediately after the teachers landed in LAX, Navarro coerced them into signing a contract paying her 10 percent of their first and second years’ salaries; she threatened those who refused with instant deportation. Even after they started at their schools, Navarro kept the teachers dependent on her by only obtaining them one-year visas before exorbitantly charging them for an annual renewal fee. She also confiscated their passports.

“We were herded into a path, a slowly constricting path,” said Ingrid Cruz, one of the teachers, during the trial, “where the moment you feel the suspicion that something is not right, you’re already way past the point of no return.” Eventually, a Los Angeles jury awarded the teachers $4.5 million.

“Similar horror stories have abounded across the country for years. Starting in 2001, the private contractor Omni Consortium promised 273 Filipino teachers jobs within the Houston, Texas school district—in reality, there were only 100 spots open. Once they arrived, the teachers were crammed into groups of 10 to 15 in unfinished housing properties. Omni Consortium kept all their documents, did not allow them their own transportation, and threatened them with deportation if they complained about their unemployment status or looked for another job.”

In a cruel twist of fate, the recruiting agencies strip the Philippines of good teachers and at the same time, Teach for America’s international division sends in ill-trained recruits to overcrowded classrooms in the Philippines:

“Launched last year, Teach for the Philippines presents itself as “the solution” to this lack of quality teachers in the country. The Teach for Philippines promo video begins with black and white shots of multitudes of young Filipino schoolchildren packed into crowded classrooms, bored and on the verge of tears. A cover version of a Killers song proclaims, “When there’s nowhere else to run … If you can hold on, hold on” as the video shifts to the students’ inevitable fates: scenes of tattooed gang kids smoking, an isolated girl and even a desperate man behind bars. In the midst of this grotesquely Orientalizing imagery, text declares, “Our Country Needs Guidance,” “Our Country Needs Inspiration,” and finally “Our Country Needs Teachers.”

“Teach for the Philippines, though relatively small now with 53 teachers in 10 schools, presents a disturbing vision for the future of teaching in the context of a global workforce. While the Filipino teachers imported to America are not necessarily ideal fits, given their inability to remain as long-term contributors to a school community, at least they are for the most part trained, experienced instructors. Within the Teach for the Philippines paradigm, however, Filipino students, robbed of their best instructors, are forced to study under recruits, who may lack a strong understanding of the communities they are joining and have often have never even had any actual classroom experience.”

A strange labor market indeed.

Categories International, Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

Pasi Sahlberg: How Are Finnish National Standards Different from CCSS?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2014 //
90

I invited Pasi Sahlberg, the eminent scholar of Finnish education, to write a brief description of how the Finnish national standards function. The key differences, as you will see, between the Finnish national standards and the Common Core standards is first, the role of teachers in writing and revising them, and second, that Finland has no external national testing of the standards

Sahlberg, who is currently a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote the following:

“Are there common core standards in Finland?

“One thing that is common to successful education systems is that teaching and learning are guided or steered by system-level expectations that all schools must follow. But there are significant differences in how these expectations are technically employed. Many Canadian provinces, for example, set specific learning targets for most of the school subjects that all teachers and schools must respect. East Asian countries also set common standards that are often integrated into learning materials and teaching methods. Many other education systems have recently developed new standards for schools that aim at raising the expectations for all schools. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the U.S. is an example of that development.

“American educators make sometimes references to Finnish school system in expressing their support to and doubts of CCSS. Those in favor claim that Finland has national standards similar to CCSS. Those with more critical views maintain that the Finnish system of steering teaching and learning is fundamentally different relying more on schools’ role in setting the actual learning goals. I will highlight how Finland’s curriculum system is similar or different to that of the U.S. through three points.

“First, formally each district (or municipality) in Finland is responsible to craft its own curriculum that guarantees that national laws and educational directives are adequately employed. In practice, however, districts have allocated this responsibility to schools after making sure that some critical aspects of curriculum are locally in harmony. This includes foreign language teaching, special education, pupil welfare issues and in many places the organization of schooling for immigrant children. It is therefore fair to say that Finnish schools have the right and the responsibility to design their own curriculum within the national frameworks and local requirements.

“Second, national curriculum frameworks serve as coordination of these school curricula. There are four binding national documents that provide guidelines for pre-school, basic school (nine years), and upper secondary schools (separate documents for general and vocational schools). These documents describe general objectives and core content that are the basis for school curricula. The bylaw on education stipulates subjects and general time allocation that direct municipalities to provide education in equal ways to all pupils in different parts of the country. For example national curriculum framework specifies general objectives and core content in mathematics separately for grades 1-2, 3-5 and 6-9 in Finnish basic school. What the schools do then is to decide detailed learning outcomes (or standards), syllabi and teaching methods for each grade level in every subject. Since there are no census-based standardized tests in Finland, the national curriculum framework documents includes common assessment criteria for a grade B (or grade 8 in Finland). Schools are relatively free to decide the form and style of their own curriculum. Time allocation and national framework curriculum for Finland’s basic school are available here: http://www.oph.fi/english/curricula_and_qualifications/basic_education.

“Third, teachers have a central role in designing the national framework curricula. Finnish government is at the moment revising the national framework curriculum for basic school. Working groups that prepare the renewed national frameworks for different subjects consist of mostly experienced teachers from all around the country. These new curricula elements are also often field tested and evaluated by teachers in order to guarantee that they are sensible and implementable in all schools. Teachers have also key role in writing textbooks that private publishers make available to all teachers. Finally, absence of national standardized tests allows teachers to teach what they think is important for pupils, and it also requires that student assessment practices must be described in detail in each school’s curriculum.

“The question remains: Does Finland have anything like the Common Core State Standards in the U.S.? On one hand, there are common national level regulations and guidelines that all districts and schools must comply. Law and its bylaws also set a common educational frame in terms of subjects and time allocation that must be respected nationwide. But these national directives serve as loose standards and strategic guidelines rather than prescribed targets that every teacher must try to accomplish.

“On the other hand, Finnish national curriculum framework doesn’t specify learning standards but only broad objectives and core content that help teachers in pedagogical architecture in their own schools. Perhaps the main difference between the CCSS and Finnish curriculum system is the central role that Finnish teachers and school principals have in both preparing the national curriculum frameworks and design actual curricula at the level of schools. Finnish authorities and parents trust the professionalism of principals and teachers than their peers do in the U.S. In other words, schools in Finland therefore much more autonomy in setting learning standards and crafting optimal learning environment for their children than schools elsewhere.

“Perhaps the main difference in the Finnish way of national steering of teaching and learning is that national curriculum frameworks don’t come with external student testing and assessment conditions. Curriculum planning at the school level is purely a question of what is best for pupils rather than how to get the most out of the attached standardized tests. When Finnish teachers don’t need to worry about external test scores and their possible affects on their work, curriculum planning can also serve as a powerful means to collegial professional development in school.

Pasi Sahlberg
June 1, 2014

Categories Common Core, International, Teachers and Teaching

Raj Chetty, VAM, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Me

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2014 //
58

On May 3, I received an email from Professor Raj Chetty of Harvard University, informing me that his famous paper on value-added assessment of teachers was being published by the American Economic Review. The paper has three authors: in addition to Chetty, the other authors include John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff, also at Harvard. When the paper was first released, it was reported on the front page of the New York Times, one of the authors discussed it on the PBS Newshour, and President Obama referred to it in his 2012 State of the Union address.

The New York Times story appeared on January 6, 2012. it began thus:

“WASHINGTON — Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.”

The reporter noted that the effect of a single “high-value” teacher was actually quite modest: “The average effect of one teacher on a single student is modest. All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college.” But think of the aggregate effect on an entire classroom: “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.” President Obama cited the aggregate income gain for a classroom in his State of the Union address 18 days later.

This was the takeaway from the authors, as reported in the New York Times:

“The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and to remove the lowest performers, despite the disruption and uncertainty involved.

“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.

“Professor Chetty acknowledged, “Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.” But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.

“Still, translating value-added scores into policy is fraught with problems. Judging teachers by their students’ test scores might encourage cheating, teaching to the test or lobbying to have certain students in class, for instance.”

The Chetty, et al, study supported VAM, which was the central feature of Race to the Top. Fire teachers sooner rather than later. One great teacher can produce lifetime gains.

Over the past few years, as more districts have implemented VAM, it has turned out to be far more complicated than the economists predicted to determine which teachers would produce great scores year after year, and which would not. Teachers were rated effective one year, ineffective the next year. Those who taught English learners, the gifted, and students with disabilities were less likely to get big gains. It turned out that VAM is affected by the composition of the classroom, since students are not randomly assigned.

But their paper continues to be the lodestar of VAM research.

Whereas it had originally appeared as a single paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the editors suggested the paper was so important that it should be split into two papers and published separately. The last time this had happened was in 1971, for papers on taxation that had won two Nobel Prizes.

Here are the papers.

Click to access w19423.pdf

Click to access w19424.pdf

Professor Chetty’s email was addressed to me and Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, who has written extensively and critically about value-added assessment. In addition to her recently published book on VAM—Rethinking Value-Added Models in Education: Critical Perspectives on Tests and Assessment-Based Accountability—she writes a blog called VAMboozled that I often cite.

For the record, I have never met Raj Chetty, and I have met Beardsley once, when she interviewed me for an oral history archive.

I asked Beardsley if she would be willing to review the latest iteration of this now famous study of VAM, and she did, here on her blog.

Beardsley notes that there is a divide between econometricians, like Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, and educational researchers, who often feel some obligation to visit classrooms and see the effects of policies, not just analyze data from a great distance, without reference to context or something like reality.

Professor Chetty and I exchanged several emails. I asked for his permission to post our exchange. He said that he preferred that I not post his comments, which were invariably polite, but of course I was free to post my comments to him.

So here goes. This was my first response:

Dear Professor Chetty,

I certainly agree that teachers are valuable. I had some wonderful teachers
as I was growing up, also some mediocre ones, and a few really bad ones. I
went to an ordinary public school system in Houston, not an elite private
school.

I wish that this sentiment about the value of teachers was all that came
from your vast publicity machine.

Instead, we get more high-stakes testing, more test prep, more phony claims
that the work of my fourth grade or fifth-grade teacher was responsible for
my not getting pregnant when I was 15. Maybe my lifetime income was
increased by my sixth-grade teacher, though I doubt it. Funny, I was one of
eight children. We all had the same teachers, and we all turned out
differently. Some of us did well in school, others nearly flunked out. Was
it the fault of our teachers?

I know you love your celebrity–and hobnobbing with Obama and Duncan and
supporting their emphasis on testing and firing teachers sooner rather than
later—but think of the harm that you do to millions of children and their
teachers by the way you publicize your work. Do you feel good every time you
read about a teacher who is graded based on the work of children she never
taught? Or the “highly effective” teacher who was rated ineffective the next
year based on test scores? Or the precipitous decline in the number of
people who want to be teachers because of the non-stop attacks on teachers?
I don’t think your positive message is getting through. All people hear is
that you want those lousy teachers whose kids get low scores to be fired.
Now.

Diane Ravitch

On May 5, I wrote to both Raj and Audrey (we had reached a first-name basis):

Raj and Audrey,

I don’t know whether my thoughts advance or retard this informed discussion.

I look at the Chetty, etc. study as comparable to a pilot in a bomber
dropping a bomb on a city 30,000 feet below. He didn’t construct the bomb,
he doesn’t know how it hurts the people below, he can’t be held responsible
if his good intentions went wrong.

I invite you to read this blog by a teacher in Oklahoma:
http://bluecerealeducation.blogspot.com/2014/05/ms-bullens-data-rich-year.html

The odds are that he never heard of Raj Chetty. But look what Raj Chetty has
done to the quality of education, the students, and the teachers in
Oklahoma. Is this something to be proud of?

Your work–not yours alone, of course–has encouraged a technocratic
approach to education that would never be tolerated in our nation’s elite
private schools.

The pursuit of higher test scores on stupid multiple-choice standardized
tests does not improve education: it corrupts it.

Those who care deeply about humanistic education, about the life of the
mind, about deep learning, find your work–no matter how technically
perfect–utterly appalling. It drains education of joy and discovery and
makes everyone a slave to Pearson.

I would love to discuss this further with you over a glass of wine. I can’t
believe you do not understand the pernicious effects of your famous study,
featured on the first page of the New York Times, on the PBS Newshour, and
in President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

It seems to be my life work to insist that education is far, far more than a
score on a standardized test. Somehow, I suspect you agree. You are far too
intelligent not to.

Diane

Later on the same day, May 5, Raj responded, and I wrote:

Thanks, Raj,

A question and a comment.

My question: Could I publish our exchange on my blog? I get about 25,000-40,000 readers daily. But I would publish nothing without your permission.

My comment: Race to the Top has incentivized the use of VAM in most states. Your study has been cited by Obama and Duncan as evidence that they are on the right track, that it is “bad teachers,” not poverty, that cause low test scores.

Based on the real-world effects of VAM on real children and real teachers, I conclude that VAM has limited use, perhaps informative in looking at the effects of policies and programs (faithfully enacted, which they seldom are) in a school or a district, but of zero value in assessing individual teacher quality. As you must know by now, the ratings for individual teachers are unstable, and may change if a different test is used or unstable for no apparent reason at all. Teachers intuitively know that their ratings reflect the composition of the class, not their “quality” or efficacy as teachers. Even if VAM did work–and it does not–it would keep every teacher singularly focused on standardized tests, which narrow the curriculum, encourage schools and teachers to avoid the neediest students, promote test prep and cheating, and have other perverse effects.

At the end of the day, I as a mother and grandmother would not want my offspring to be enrolled in a school where standardized tests dominate teaching and learning. And that is precisely what VAM is doing to our nation’s public schools.

My third grandson enters third grade in a New York City public school next September. I hope by then that the opt out movement has grown so strong that teachers cannot be subjected to unfair and inaccurate VAMs. I will do whatever I can to encourage parents in every school district in the U.S. to keep their children home on testing day. That seems to be the only way that the giant standardized testing machine can be stopped.

Your work has been crucial in promoting standardized testing as the measure of teacher quality, even though major scholarly organizations disagree (the American Educational Research Association, the National Academy of Education, the American Statistical Association).

If you have modified your views (message: “fire teachers sooner rather than later”); if you have learned anything new since you first introduced your findings, I would love to know about it.

I repeat that I do not have the technical ability to argue algorithms with you. Your study may be technically brilliant. But its consequences for the quality of education and the lives of children and teachers have been disastrous. In its current application, it is Junk Science. Since I feel certain you don’t want to be remembered in history as the economist who sponsored Junk Science and treated children as data points, I hope you will give me reason to believe that you have rethought the conclusions of your study and provided clear warnings about the limitations and misuses of VAM.

Diane

We ended with the understanding that I would not quote his words or paraphrase them. I think I was true to that understanding.

Now, as I told him, I am not an economist, and I lack the technical proficiency to critique his paper. Maybe it will win two or three Nobel prizes. If all it says is that teachers are valuable, I agree. If it says that teacher affect eternity, I agree.

But if he really expects me to believe that my fifth-grade teacher (or was it my fourth-grade teacher) caused me to get higher test scores, and that because of her and my higher test scores, I did not get pregnant when I was 15, I think this is just plain silly.

This strikes me as the kind of study that brings huzzahs from economists for its technical precision, but is unrelated to the messiness of real life. The numbers may all add up, but there are no living, breathing students or teachers here, just data.

It is so incredibly frustrating to me to see economists and policymakers playing with the lives of children and teachers as if they were ants seen from a far distance or merely data points. I recommend to my new friend Raj a book by Yale Professor James C. Scott titled “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.” It changed my life. Maybe it will change his too.

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Bob Shepherd on the Insanity of “Education Reform”

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2014 //
69

Bob Shepherd writes on the absurd demands now placed on teachers and principals by politicians, who expect to see higher test scores every year. Step back and you realize that the politicians, the policy wonks, the economists, and the ideologues are ruining education, not improving it. They are doing their best to demoralize professional educators. What are they thinking? Are they thinking? Or is it just their love of disruption, let loose on children, families, communities, and educators?

Bon Shepherd writes:

OK, you are sitting in your year-end evaluation session, and you’ve heard from every other teacher in your school that his or her scores were a full level lower this year than last, and so you know that the central office has leaned on the principal to give fewer exemplary ratings even though your school actually doesn’t have a problem with its test scores and people are doing what they did last year but a bit better, of course, because one grows each year as a teacher–one refines what one did before, and one never stops learning.

But you know that this ritual doesn’t have anything, really, to do with improvement. It has to do with everyone, all along the line, covering his or her tushy and playing the game and doing exactly what he or she is told. And, at any rate, everyone knows that the tests are not particularly valid and that’s not really the issue at your school because, the test scores are pretty good because this is a suburban school with affluent parents, and the kids always, year after year, do quite well.

So whether the kids are learning isn’t really the issue. The issue is that by some sort of magic formula, each cohort of kids is supposed to perform better than the last–significantly better–on the tests, though they come into your classes in exactly the same shape they’ve always come into them in because, you know, they are kids and they are just learning and teaching ISN’T magic. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s magical, sometimes, of course, but its’ not magic. There’s no magic formula.

So, the stuff you’ve been told to do in your “trainings” (“Bark. Roll over. Sit. Good Boy”) is pretty transparently teaching-to-the-test because that’s the only way the insane demand that each cohort will be magically superior to the last as measured by these tests can be met, but you feel in your heart of hearts that doing that would be JUST WRONG–it would short-change your students to start teaching InstaWriting-for-the-Test, Grade 5, instead of, say, teaching writing. And despite all the demeaning crap you are subjected to, you still give a damn.

And you sit there and you actually feel sorry for this principal because she, too, is squirming like a fly in treacle in the muck that is Education Deform, and she knows she has fantastic teachers who knock it out of the park year after year, but her life has become a living hell of accountability reports and data chats to the point that she doesn’t have time for anything else anymore (she has said this many times), and now she has to sit there and tell her amazing veteran teachers who have worked so hard all these years and who care so much and give so much and are so learned and caring that they are just satisfactory, and she feels like hell doing this and is wondering when she can retire.

And the fact that you BOTH know this hangs there in the room–the big, ugly, unspoken thing. And the politicians and the plutocrats and the policy wonks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Secretary of the Department for the Standardization of US Education, formerly the USDE, and the Vichy education guru collaborators with these people barrel ahead, like so many drunks in a car plowing through a crowd of pedestrians.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Principals, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Congratulations, Brian Page! This Is What Teachers Do.

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2014 //
14

After years of endless negative press about teachers, it was refreshing to pick up the New York Times and read a story about Brian Page, who teaches high school students about economics and personal finance. He teaches them through life experience and field trips what economics means in their own lives.

Page took his students to a pawn shops where they learned about what it means to borrow, about interest, and about their credit scores.

“Stop 1 was at LoanMax, which allows people who own their cars free and clear to use them as collateral for loans. “Take charge of your life,” said business cards sitting on a counter. A half-dozen students entered the store with Mr. Page, who asked about interest rates. The person at the counter said that the annual interest rate would be 24.99 percent and that one missed payment could lead to repossession of the vehicle, a fact that shocked the rest of the students on the bus when Mr. Page debriefed them on the visit.”

At another shop, they learned how interest rates increased the cost of appliances.

“By the time the group was breaking up, the day’s lessons seem to have sunk in for Ciara Meinking, 18. “It’s just crazy how expensive all of this is and how they con you into stuff, and you don’t ever get a lot of the money,” she said.”

What a great day of life lessons!

Categories Teachers and Teaching

New York City’s Teachers Adrift, Victims of Reform

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2014 //
21

During the decade or so in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg totally controlled the public schools of New York City, he relied on test scores as the measure of students, teachers, principals, and schools. His was a managerial mindset devoid of any philosophy of education or of any concern for the lives of individuals or communities. Collateral damage was unimportant, and many people fell under his wheels. His primary strategy was to close schools with low scores and open new schools. He believed in small schools, even though few of these schools had the facilities or staff for English language learners, students with disabilities, or advanced classes in math or science or anything else. After he had been in office for a number of years, he was closing some of the new schools. The central office could literally murder a school by directing large numbers of low-scoring students to it, which was a death sentence. As schools began to die (and he had a particular hatred for large schools), good students moved out and the death cycle was accelerated as the stats looked worse and worse.

What happened to the teachers in the schools marked for closure? Some got out as fast as they could, others stayed in their post, either because they were devoted to the school and hoped it would be saved if they tried harder or because they felt committed to the students. When the school at last was closed, many tenured teachers were set adrift. They could apply to other schools but because they were experienced, they were expensive and many principals preferred to have two new teachers than one veteran. So the teachers without a school were placed in what was called the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), where they stayed on salary but floated through the system as substitutes or short-timers. The press regularly ridiculed them as incompetents, although most had lost their job through no fault of their own, and some or many were expert teachers.

In this post, Lynne Winderbaum tells the story of the ATRs. She is a retired ESL teacher.

Categories New York City, Teachers and Teaching

Russ Walsh: “Reformers” Don’t Know What Motivates Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2014 //
72

Russ Walsh writes that corporate reformers have no idea what motivates teachers so they impose their own flawed ideas. Few have ever taught. They listen to economists, most of whom see education as an economic activity, not a humanistic activity.

First, they decided that the teacher is the most important determinant of student test scores (not true, the best predictor of student scores is family income and education). Then they decide that the best way to motivate teachers to work harder is to devise a system of rewards and punishments. Scores will rise, they reason, if teachers are threatened with loss of their careers.

But this is all wrong. Teachers are not motivated by carrots and sticks.

What motivates teachers?

Teachers are motivated by students.

“Nothing can motivate a teacher to be well-prepared and perform at peak ability more than the simple fact their will be 25 or so faces looking at you in the morning, waiting for you to teach them. When students have a moment of insight, teachers feel empowered. When a student is struggling to understand, the teacher is motivated to find a way to get through.”

Teachers are motivated by teaching.

“Teaching is intrinsically rewarding. For those of us who chose to go into the profession, teaching is fun. It is energizing. I have had many times in my life when I didn’t feel particularly well or when I was tired and then I began to teach and I felt better, more energized. I can teach myself awake and I have seen many other teachers who do the same thing.”

Teachers are motivated by good working conditions.

“While a reasonable living wage is certainly important to every teacher, in my experience in hiring teachers, I have found them to be more interested in the working conditions they will find in the school where they will work. What working conditions matter? Reasonable class sizes. Adequate resources to do the job. Adequate planning time. A clean building in good repair. Supportive administrators. Suportive and engaged parents. Friendly and supportive colleagues.”

Please, reformers, read the whole post and learn what motivates teachers.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Marie Corfield: In Honor of Retiring Educators Everywhere

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2014 //
22

Marie Corfield, tireless advocate for children and teachers, prepared a speech to honor her retiring colleagues in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

She noted that on that night, the schools of New Jersey were losing 500 years of experience.

Too many good teachers leaving, retiring.

She writes:

“Within the first 6 months of Christie’s first term the number of public school employees who filed for retirement almost doubled that of the previous year. While I don’t have statistics on the past 4 years, I have personally spoken to many retiring educators who are simply fed up. A special education teacher with whom I had the honor to work for 10 years, who worked miracles with our most challenging children for over 20 years, told me that while she didn’t want to retire, she could no longer subject her students to education ‘reform’. Another is taking an early retirement, sacrificing part of her pension, because she just can’t take it anymore. This is how we ‘attract and retain the best teachers’? This is how we make a great public education system better? We make educators’ jobs so unbearable that they leave rather than inflict damaging policies on their students?”

We have had a barrage of damaging policies and attacks on hard-working teachers. Marie is one of those teachers who has been a model for others. She won’t give up. Neither will we. Don’t retire if you have the fortitude to persist. Stay in your position. Fight for your kids and your profession. Outlast the Know-Nothings..

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Heidi Nance: I Am Teacher, Hear Me Roar!

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2014 //
54

Heidi Nance, a teacher in El Paso, Texas, tells the story here of a decision that changed her life. She decided to stop pretending that policy and politics had nothing to do with her. She would stop passively supporting policies that she knew were wrong. She made a decision to become an active advocate for her children and her profession. She made a decision to take an active role in shaping events and being a leader. Learn how she reached this turning point in her professional and personal life.

I AM A TEACHER!

Today, there is a war against education. Men in offices are actively making decisions that will affect the way we teach. Today, there is a war against children. Men in offices are actively making decisions that will affect the way children learn. Today, we are their foot soldiers. Every day we march into our classrooms and do the work of these men in offices. These men know nothing of children, or teaching, or education. These men believe they have found the answer: accountability.

I am so blessed. I have an amazing administration that allows me to do what is best for my students. The great Sir Ken Robinson gave an interview and in that interview he explained that for the children we teach, we are their educational system. The children know nothing of policy or politics; all they know is what we do in our classrooms. I took great solace in that, and I decided to make sure that I always did right by the children in my class. But recently I started thinking of all the children in other schools, other cities, and other states. What about those children? And I realized it is not enough. I cannot say I hate what is happening in education and continue to passively support bad policies every day in my classroom.

In March I went to the Network for Public Education National Conference. I met educators, parents, activists, and journalist from all over the country. We all shared a common goal – to take back public education. Public education is paid for by the people and belongs to the people. It belongs to us. And I had forgotten that. I lost my voice, but there, in Austin I found it. It is loud, and it is great. It is my teaching voice. You know the voice I am talking about. The other day my daughter came into my classroom while I was teaching. Later she told me “Mama, you sound weird when you teach.” I joked and told her that when you are a teacher you can have no fear. Children can smell fear. So today, I am using my teaching voice.

I am not afraid.

When I was at the conference, I felt so empowered. My mind raced with ideas. My body vibrated with excitement. I returned from the conference, and all the joy and energy drained from my body, and I thought “now what?” How do I take all my ideas and turn them into action? So that is what I am doing today. I do believe in accountability for teachers, and today I am holding myself accountable. I am accountable to the children I teach.

On Monday, I will walk into my classroom and remember that every child is different. Just like every child walks when he is ready, every child learns he is ready. I will not shame children for not following the time table set forth by politicians. Instead, I will cheer and encourage because I know that every child starts at a different point and that as long as they are moving forward, all the great teachers at my school will help each child to reach his or her full potential.

I will make sure that I only have the highest of expectations for my students. But I will remind myself that the burden of high expectations falls on me. It is my job to make sure that everything I ask of my students is developmentally appropriate, and I will speak up when it is not. It is up to me to support and scaffold the learning of my students. I will make sure everything I say and do in my classroom is supported by research. I will realize that high expectations, without the research to back it up, is the mantra of politicians who support high stakes testing.

I will set individual goals for each of my students. I will realize that by setting inappropriate goals, I will only discourage my children who need encouragement the most. I will demand that every day my students smile, laugh, play, and learn.

I am accountable to myself. I will continue to educate myself. I will read books by great educators and historians like John Kuhn, Alfie Kohn, and Diane Ravitch. I will scrutinize the policy decisions of our state legislators and our Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I will be outraged when he bullies our state into tying teacher evaluations to test scores. I will support organizations like Network for Public Education, Fair Test, Defending the Early Years, and Texas Children Can’t Wait. I will spend my weekends writing letters to the editor, letters to my congressman, and letters to the president.

I am accountable to the public. I will speak up when people make false statements about public schools and education. I will explain to them that the dialogue about public schools has been hijacked by people who intend to dismantle and profit off of it. I will tell them that our schools are not failing. Instead, movies like Waiting for Superman are propaganda used to promote an agenda that will only hurt our minority and special needs students.

I will speak out when people reference our schools’ international ranking. I will inform them that when we account for children living in poverty, our students are ranked among the highest in the world. I will point out that 23% percent of children in the United States live in poverty. The second highest of any industrialized nation. Our schools are not failing; our society is failing.

I will educate people about the failures of high stakes tests, merit pay, VAM, and retention. I will explain to them why charters and vouchers are not the answer. Every child deserves a high quality, neighborhood school. No child should have to put his hopes and dreams into a lottery. I will inform them that researchers already have the answers to help low performing schools. They include preschool for all children living in poverty. The earlier, the better. Prenatal care for mothers. Safe homes and safe neighborhoods. Wrap around services like school libraries, school nurses and school councilors, smaller classes, and a well rounded curriculum rich in the humanities and the arts. I will remind people that our country has only been successful because we are a country of innovators and that standardized tests stand to crush every ounce of creativity our children have. I quote Robert Schaffer who said, “Believing we can improve schooling with more tests is like believing you can make yourself grow taller by measuring your height.”

I am accountable to my fellow teachers. We must allow our teachers to collaborate, not compete. It does not benefit children to have teachers competing for bonuses or the highest test scores. We cannot set up a system where teachers are afraid to work with the neediest students for fear of losing their jobs. High risk students should not equal high risk employment.

I am accountable to my students’ parents. I will support and educate the parents who are unable to help their children. I will provide them with materials and compassion because they are not the enemy. Inequality and inequity in schools is the enemy. Segregation is the enemy. Years of bad bilingual education policy is the enemy.

I will even have compassion for the so called helicopter parent. I will realize that my silence has allowed for them to lose all faith in public education. The media has fed them a steady diet of failing schools, failing children, and failing teachers. With our unstable economy and a shrinking middle class, it is not surprising that parents are fighting tooth and nail to help their children succeed. Every time we are silent we allow for the continued distrust of educators and for the deprofessionalization of teachers.

I am accountable. I am accountable to myself, the public, my colleagues, my parents, and my students. But even more I am accountable to all the students in classrooms across this vast and diverse country. But I am not afraid. I am a teacher.

I stand before children every day and I teach them. I teach them things they need to know and things they never dreamed of knowing. I teach them to believe in themselves and each other. I teach them to question, and push, and explore. I teach children with no parents and no home, and children with 4 parents and 2 homes. I teach children that they are the difference this world needs. They are amazing and creative and on the verge of excellence, all while being only a small piece of the puzzle that is humanity. I am a teacher.

And so on Monday I will go into my classroom, and I will teach. I will use my teaching voice with my students, and when I leave I will use my teaching voice with anyone willing to listen, and even those who refuse to listen, because I am not afraid.

I am a teacher.

Heidi Nance

Categories Network for Public Education, Teachers and Teaching

Jonathan Lovell: The Magic of Learning to Listen

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2014 //
35

Jonathan Lovell has been leading writing workshops for many years.

In this delightful post, he describes his struggle to finish his own dissertation, and the flights of fancy that kept blocking his path.

He uses graphics creatively to reflect his state of mind. You watch his thinking evolve.

Watch a writer at work and lament with him that the Obama administration eliminated the minimal funding needed to keep more than 200 sites of the National Writing Project alive, summer institutes where teachers experience the love of learning without the threat of test scores and VAM. No utilitarian purpose, just freedom to think and create.

Categories Real Education, Teachers and Teaching
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