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And Now a Word about Teacher Appreciation Week

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2014 //
42

Laurel Sturt, a teacher, sent this note, responding to an email from StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee. The teacher has Michelle wrong. Michelle doesn’t hate teachers. She just wants to see more of them fired, lose their teaching license, lose their mortgage, and suffer grievously unless they raise test scores every year. Let’s be clear. She appreciates some teachers. The winners. Don’t you get it? Life is a racetrack. Test scores are the metric.

“Michelle Rhee is providing a thank you card for people to give to teachers, with all sorts of glowing compliments to teachers. I just posted this on Facebook:

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, as well as Breathtaking Hypocrisy Week. Here Champion and Defender of Teachers Michelle Rhee encourages us to download a not-so-free card (in exchange for our personal contact info and sign up to volunteer for her). If we’re all she says we are, then why does she hate us so? http://www.studentsfirst.org/page/s/download-this-card-and-show-appreciation-to-a-teacher

You can’t make this stuff up!

Best,

Laurel”

Categories Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Teachers and Teaching

Arthur Goldstein: Why I Don’t Like the New Teachers’ Contract in NYC

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2014 //
58

Arthur Goldstein is a high school English teacher and chapter chair of the United Federation of Teachers at Francis Lewis High School. He is part of the opposition to the Unity Caucus that leads his union, the UFT in New York City. In response to my post praising the recent contract agreement between New York City and the UFT, Goldstein wrote this dissent:

 

************

 

It’s been almost six years since NYC teachers have received a raise. This was particularly frustrating since most NYC employees received twin raises of 4% in the 2008-2010 round of pattern bargaining. While they got more money with no givebacks, our leadership helped craft the junk-science based NY APPR law. The entire state got a junk-science based evaluation system. We were told the beauty of it was that it could be negotiated, but when that didn’t work out leadership allowed John King to write it for us.

 

Now there is an agreement, but UFT members will receive not only the retro money, but also the salary raises almost a decade later than FDNY, NYPD, or DSNY. Being a teacher, I don’t know a whole lot about money. Still, I’m fairly certain that money has more value in 2010 than 2020, when we will finally be made whole. It’s plainly disingenuous to argue we have parity with the other unions.

 

 

There are other issues in this contract that are troubling. Paramount to me is that of due process for ATR teachers. The UFT agreed in 2005 to create the Absent Teacher Reserve. The UFT had supported mayoral control, which helped enable the massive school closures favored by Bloomberg, and rather than insist teachers in closing schools be placed in classrooms, it made them wandering subs, covering for absent teachers. They now wander from school to school, week to week. They are vilified and stereotyped in the media on a regular basis.

 

I’ve worked with and advocated for several ATR teachers. I can assure you, despite the nonsense propagated by self-styled expert Campbell Brown, that those teachers were guilty of nothing more than either being in the wrong school at the right time, or being targeted for no good reason . Under our new system, any ATR teacher accused by two principals of ineffective behavior will receive an expedited one-day 3020a hearing, after which this person may be fired on the spot. I fail to see why ATR teachers should have fewer due process rights than I do.

 

As for Ms. Campbell Brown, apparently there is hat tip in the agreement to her:

 

The rules also expand the definition of sexual misconduct, which will make it easier for the city to fire teachers for actions like inappropriate touching or texting, officials said.

 

I can’t really say whether or not this rule is reasonable, since neither I nor anyone who voted on this agreement has actually seen it. Generally, it would be shocking that a 300-member contract committee could approve an agreement it hadn’t seen. However since the overwhelming majority of that committee were members of the elite, invitation-only UFT Unity Caucus, and had signed an oath promising to support whatever leadership told them to, it would not be surprising to me if they had nominated a cheese sandwich for President of the United States.

 

We’re also looking at a program that strongly smells of merit pay, something that’s been tried and failed in the US for about a century. This is the UFT’s second flirtation with such a program, and like the last one, discarded as a failure, it is presented as not merit pay.

 

Another mysterious issue in the proposal is this:

 

Under the tentative deal, collaborative school communities will have new opportunities to innovate outside the confines of the UFT contract and DOE regulations. A new program known as Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) will give educators in participating schools greater voice in decision-making and a chance to experiment with new strategies.

 

This sounds very much like the original concept of charter schools, and we all know where that has led us. I’m wary of anything with “excellence” in the title, because it clearly implies those of us who do not participate somehow oppose excellence. Also, there is a clear implication in such programs that our Contract somehow hinders excellence, which I do not believe.

 

My experience and observation suggests schools do better with strong principals and strong chapter leaders being adversarial when necessary, but working together when it benefits the school. I’ve also observed schools with little or no union presence having programs imposed on them that are less than productive, and I can certainly envision that happening here.

 

I’m further puzzled by several things UFT President Michael Mulgrew wrote us when he announced the agreement.

 

The union won major changes, including a focus on eight instead of 22 Danielson components and a better system for rating teachers in non-tested subjects.

 

I have heard directly from union sources that they’d insisted on focusing on all of Danielson, and that making them focus on all aspects was a great victory. Apparently making them focus on fewer factors is also a victory. We shall see what happens with non-tested subjects.

 

A more substantive improvement might have been to let supervisors off the hook from so many observations. If a competent supervisor observes a teacher doing a good job, and receives no complaints about that teacher, the supervisor ought not to have to revisit that teacher 3 to 5 additional times that year. Supervisors ought to be focusing their attention on supporting teachers who actually need their help.
We succeeded in eliminating time-consuming teaching artifacts.

 

Again, union sources have told me directly that the inclusion of artifacts was a great union victory, empowering teachers. Apparently the exclusion is also a victory. When the union does one thing, it’s a great victory. When they do the opposite, it’s another great victory. I’m troubled by that.

 

Moving forward, fellow educators — rather than consultants or other third parties — will serve as the “validators” brought in the next year to review the work of a teacher rated ineffective.

 

In 3020a hearings, in which teachers can be fired, the burden of proof has traditionally been on the DOE to establish teacher incompetence. The validators would have had the option of placing the burden on teachers to establish they were not incompetent, a very high hurdle. Now, though this practice has never even been tested, with no evidence whatsoever, it is deemed to be improved. I would not wish to ever sit in judgment of my colleagues as to whether or not the city should have to establish their incompetence. I would question the motives of any colleague who would.

 

I fail to see why my brother and sister UFT members deserve any less financial consideration than those in other municipal unions. As for the other factors in this contract, the devil is in the details. Thus far we haven’t seen them, but history suggests a lack of foresight in insular UFT leadership, which has supported allowing teachers to become ATRs, charter schools, co-locations, the NYS APPR law, junk science teacher rating, Common Core, and mayoral control, none of which have helped public school teachers, parents or children.

 

Finally, I’m not particularly proud that we’re set to impose a pattern for all other city unions that will not allow them even to keep up with inflation for the next 7 years. If the best we can do is worsen conditions for our brother and sister unionists, we’re not doing our jobs very well at all.

Categories Education Reform, NYC, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

A Triumphant Return to Professionalism in New York City

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
97

A New Contract, A New Beginning
The other day the largest teacher union in the nation (New York City’s United Federation of Teachers) and the New York City Department of Education reached a ground breaking agreement on a new contract. Subject to approval by union members, this agreement should explode many of the myths that corporate education reformers like to spread about teacher unions. It shows that in an environment of trust and respect unions and districts can come together and agree on innovations that make sense for students. These innovations are not driven by the unimaginative test-based accountability metrics and privatization schemes that corporate reformers espouse and are now being imposed on the community and students in nearby Newark. Rather, they are founded on principles of mutual learning, collaboration, and support.

 

 

First let’s take a look at the history.

 

New York City’s teachers have been working without a contract for five years. There was no agreement because Mayor Bloomberg insisted that in any new contract “schools identified as being at risk of phase out or closure” be forced to follow “a modified, scaled down version of [the] collective bargaining agreement.” This ignored the fact that it was Bloomberg’s own policies, such as deliberately overloading specific schools with the most challenging students, which created these so-called failing schools. Bloomberg wanted to modify the pay scale so that teachers with high value-added scores would receive additional pay. This, despite all the research showing that such metrics are not valid. At the same time Bloomberg insisted that teachers not get raises that, at a minimum, kept up with the rate of inflation. Bloomberg demanded that any teachers who lost their positions due to declining school budgets or closure be fired after 4 months if they did not find another permanent position (they were, of course, used to fill temporary teaching positions and were working with students every single day). Again he ignored the fact that more experienced educators were over-represented in this pool, due to his policy of charging schools for the actual salaries of teachers rather than the district average. This meant that schools were incentivized not to hire experienced educators. Research in other districts has already shown that this approach does not help students and must therefore be chalked-up to pure ideology rather than an interest in improving public education.
What changed? Carmen Farina, the new Chancellor, is a true educator, having taught for 22 years before becoming a principal, then a superintendent, and then deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. Bill DeBlasio, the new mayor, praises public servants for their dedication to public service. Together with the UFT leadership they were able to come to agreement on a genuinely innovative set of ideas.
First they addressed the bread and butter issues. Teachers will receive raises that slightly exceed the rate of inflation over the past 5 years and will receive additional raises, including back pay, going forward. These raises and payments will be spread out across a number of years, which will ease the impact on the city budget and allow city social programs to access funding after being squeezed for many years. Teachers will continue to receive free health insurance which, in an environment of continuously increasing healthcare costs, represents an additional and significant raise. At the same time the city and the union agreed on over a billion dollars in savings through more efficient provision and management of the health insurance programs.
Then they agreed to build cultures of collaboration and learning in schools. Schools will be permitted to modify the contract to meet the individualized needs of their school with the agreement of 65% of the faculty. Teachers who take on leadership roles by sharing their expertise with colleagues, coaching colleagues, spreading best practices in their schools, and opening up their classrooms as learning labs will be eligible for career ladder bonuses. None of this will happen in a top-down manner.
They agreed to move away from an overemphasis on test-prep by ending the 150 weekly minutes of small group test-prep sessions. They repurposed that time to create structures for professional development and parent engagement that will support genuine teaching and learning. This includes adding parent-teacher conference days, adding weekly professional development and collaboration time for faculty, and adding time for weekly parent outreach.
They also agreed that teachers would not be evaluated based on the test scores of students they don’t teach. That this was even a possibility is one of the absurd outcomes of the corporate reformer obsession with putting a number to everything, even when that number clearly makes no sense.
They agreed that teachers will hold each other accountable to the highest standards of the profession. This includes teachers serving as peer-observers and validators for colleagues who received poor ratings the year prior.
They agreed to ease out the small number of teachers who are not suited to the profession. This includes an expedited firing process for teachers who are unable to find permanent positions (despite being given the opportunity to teach at schools with openings and their salaries being paid independently of the school’s budget) and who have been released from two schools for documented unprofessional behaviors.
Importantly the New York City Department of Education committed to providing curricula to all teachers. Under the former management, when the headquarters building was populated by data analysts with no expertise in education, such a promise would have been impossible to fulfill. This foreshadows a return of educators to the central offices who can support teachers and schools, appointed to positions of influence.
This agreement will help turn the page on the corporate-reformer playbook. For all their money, and powerful lobbying groups, and media influence, it will be hard to argue now that top-down mandates, teacher bashing, and test-driven accountability is the way to innovate in education. Districts such as Cincinnati, Ohio, Union City, New Jersey, and Meriden, Connecticut have already shown that collaboration and educator-driven change create the innovations that lead to better student learning. With this agreement, New York City has joined this group of dynamic innovators.

Categories New York City, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, Unions

Mike Rose Has Six Questions for Arne Duncan about Teacher Education

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
45

Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced his plan to judge teacher education programs by their “results,” including the test scores of the students taught by their graduates. If the Ed Schools can’t produce teachers who can raise test scores, Duncan said, they should go out of business. Spoken like a true businessman.

Mike Rose, celebrated author and professor emeritus at UCLA, has six questions for Arne.

He writes:

Six Questions for Secretary Duncan

1. Will you be evaluating with the same metrics all teacher preparation programs, alternative as well as traditional, Teach for America as well as California State University at Northridge or UCLA?

2. If the Department of Education will use close to $100 million per year on grants to forward its agenda, where will that money come from? From other educational programs that serve needy populations? If so, what services or funding will be cut or discontinued because of this reallocation?

3. Policy formation emerges out of staff research, consultation with experts, and political deliberation. What research and consultation leads you to the current project? I ask because your statement about teacher preparation programs needing to improve “or go out of business” as well as your general approach echoes last year’s report from the National Council of Teacher Quality, a report that has been roundly criticized by a wide range of experts.

4. The National Academy of Education recently issued a comprehensive report on evaluating teacher education programs that recommends an approach very different from yours. Have you read it or consulted its authors?

5. There is an increasing number of respected scholarly organizations—the National Academies Board on Testing and Assessment, AERA, the National Academy of Education, the American Statistical Association—that are advising caution in the use of procedures like value-added to evaluate teacher effectiveness. These organizations point to technical, logistical, and conceptual problems in doing so. One conceptual problem imputing causality between teachers’ activity and a test score, for so many other variables come into play. Your stated plan will use student test scores to not only judge teachers, but also the institutions from which they come, introducing another level of questionable causal attribution in your model. You will have a putative causal chain that goes from the student test score to the teacher to the teacher’s training institution. How do you plan to address this basic conceptual problem?

6. The implication in your plan that bad schools will go out of business assumes that all prospective teachers are the economist’s idealized free agents who can go wherever a highly rated program exists. But a number of prospective teachers from lower income backgrounds do not have the finances to travel—or cannot travel because of family obligations and expectations. How will you address the possible unintended consequence of your program placing burdens on this segment of the population?

Thanks, Mike. If I hear from Secretary Duncan, I will post his answers.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Bruce Baker: Meet Arne Duncan’s Latest Nutty Idea

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2014 //
11

Bruce Baker can’t believe that Arne Duncan admires the Relay “Graduate” School of Education, where charter teachers grant masters’ degrees to their colleagues. This demeans the very concept of professionalism and graduate study. But it reveals Duncan’s essential contempt for education.

What if Duncan were in charge of medical education (heaven forbid).

Here is the Duncan model of medical education:

Baker writes:

“Let’s……consider the model of the future – one which blends Arne Duncan’s otherwise entirely inconsistent models of training. I give you:

“The Relay Medical College and North Star Community Hospital

“Here’s how it all works. Deep in the heart of some depressed urban core where families and their children suffer disproportionate obesity, asthma and other chronic health conditions, where few healthy neighborhood groceries exist, but plenty of fast food joints are available, sits the newly minted North Star Community Hospital.

“It all starts here. NSCH is a new kind of hospital that does not require any of its staff to actually hold medical degrees, any form of board certification or nursing credential, or even special technician degrees to operate medical equipment or handle medications. Rather, NSCH recruits bright young undergrads from top liberal arts colleges, with liberal arts majors, and puts them through an intense 5 week training program where they learn to berate and belittle minority families and children and shame them into eating more greens and fiber. Where they learn to demean them into working out – walking the treadmill, etc. It’s rather like an episode of the Biggest Loser. And the Hospital is modeled on the premise that if it can simply engage enough of the community members in its bootcamp style wellness program, delivered by these fresh young faces, they can substantively alter the quality of life in the urban core.

“There is indeed some truth to the argument. Getting more community members to eat healthier and exercise will improve their health stats, including morbidity and mortality measures commonly used in Hospital rating systems. In fact, over time, this Hospital, which provides no actual medical diagnosis and treatment does produce annual reports that show astoundingly good outcome measures for community members who complete their program.

“These great outcome measures generate headlines from the local news writers who fail to explore more deeply what they mean (Yes Star Ledger editorial board, that’s you!). NCSH becomes such a darling of the media and politicians that they are granted authority to start their own medical school to replicate their “successes.” And they are granted the authority to run a medical school where medical training need not even be provided by individuals with medical training!

“Rather, they will grant medical degrees to their own incoming staff based on their own experiences with healthcare awesomeness. That’s right, individuals who themselves had little or no basic science or actual supervised clinical training in actual medicine, but have 3 to 5 years of experience in medical awesomeness in this start-up (pseudo) Hospital will grant medical degrees – to their own incoming peers!”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Teachers and Teaching

Teacher: I Will NOT Resign!

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2014 //
62

A letter from a teacher. He echoes my sentiments exactly. Stay and fight. Resist. Don’t let the teacher-bashers win. Not only are teachers “in the trenches,” but now teachers are engaging in trench warfare, holding on to their professional ethics and fighting for their students against powerful forces. Be there when the whole phony “ed reform” ideology collapses, as it will.

 

Here is good advice:

 

As a teacher of almost 20 years I am kind of getting tired of all of these “resignation letters”. Don’t these teachers realize that quitting is EXACTLY what the ed-deform crowd wants them to do? The ed-deformers want a constant churn of young, cheap labor. They want easily manipulated new teachers who will never become vested in a pension. They want teachers who will keep their mouths closed and do what they are told. They don’t want anbody to stir the boat. Most of all, they want QUITTERS. I say stick it out and fight the good fight! Be a thorn in the side of the ed-deform crowd. Never quit. Make the ed-deformers quit.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Discovery Network’s Offensive TV Program “Bad Teachers” Canceled

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2014 //
44

Good news! Obnoxious TV program –“Bad Teachers”-/slandering an entire profession was canceled. One reader described it as the TV equivalent of “Waiting for Superman.”

********

Randi put out this statement, which is how I learned about it.

For Immediate Release
April 29, 2014

AFT’s Weingarten on Discovery’s Decision to Cancel ‘Bad Teacher’

Washington—Statement of AFT President Randi Weingarten on Discovery Communications’ decision to cancel the television show ‘Bad Teacher.’

“I was surprised to learn, through a barrage of tweets Sunday night after “Bad Teachers” aired, that Discovery would use its brand to promote such an offensive program. However, I am heartened that it has taken steps to cancel the show and publicly affirm that Discovery Education’s mission is to celebrate and support educators.

“Every day, educators go into the classroom to make a difference in the lives of our children. Their work should be honored and valued, not bashed, and we hope to work with Discovery to showcase the real work teachers do every day to help kids achieve their dreams.

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Mercedes Schneider: Who Are the 24 People Who Wrote the Common Core Standards?

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2014 //
102

A few days ago, I posted the names of the members of the “work groups” that wrote the Common Core standards. There was one work group for English language arts and another for mathematics. There were some members who served on both work groups.

 

Altogether, 24 people wrote the Common Core standards. None identified himself or herself as a classroom teacher, although a few had taught in the past (not the recent past). The largest contingent on the work groups were representatives of the testing industry.

 

Mercedes Schneider looked more closely at the 24 members of the two work groups to determine their past experience as educators, with special attention to whether they had any classroom experience.

 

Here are a few noteworthy conclusions based on her review of the careers of the writers of the CCSS:

 

In sum, only 3 of the 15 individuals on the 2009 CCSS math work group held positions as classroom teachers of mathematics. None was a classroom teacher in 2009. None taught elementary or middle school mathematics. Three other members have other classroom teaching experience in biology, English, and social studies. None taught elementary school. None taught special education or was certified in special education or English as a Second Language (ESL).

Only one CCSS math work group member was not affiliated with an education company or nonprofit….

 

In sum, 5 of the 15 individuals on the CCSS ELA work group have classroom experience teaching English. None was a classroom teacher in 2009. None taught elementary grades, special education, or ESL, and none hold certifications in these areas.

Five of the 15 CCSS ELA work group members also served on the CCSS math work group. Two are from Achieve; two, from ACT, and one, from College Board.

 

One member of the work groups has a BA in elementary education but no record of ever having taught those grades.

 

Almost all members who had any classroom experience were high school teachers.

 

Schneider concludes:

 

My findings indicate that NGA and CCSSO had a clear, intentional bent toward CCSS work group members with assessment experience, not with teaching experience, and certainly not with current classroom teaching experience.

In both CCSS work groups, the number of individuals with “ACT” and “College Board” designations outnumbered those with documented classroom teaching experience.

 

The makeup of the work groups helps to explain why so many people in the field of early childhood education find the CCSS to be developmentally inappropriate. There was literally no one on the writing committee (with one possible exception) with any knowledge of how very young children learn. The same concern applies to those who educate children in the middle-school years or children with disabilities or English language learners. The knowledge of these children and their needs was not represented on the working group.

 

 

 

 

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Education Reform, Special Education, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Michael Fiorillo: Reformers’ Game Plan

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2014 //
158

Reader Michael Fiorillo deciphers the corporate reformers’ game plan:

The Final Solution to the Teacher Question:

– Proclaim austerity for the public schools, while continuing to expand charters.

– Create incentives for non-educators to be in positions of power, from Assistant Principal on up.

– Maintain a climate of scapegoating and witch hunting for “bad teachers,” who are posited as the cause of poverty and student failure, doing everything possible to keep debate from addressing systemic inequities.

– Neutralize and eventually eliminate teacher unions (the first part largely accomplished in the case of the AFT). As part of that process, eliminate tenure, seniority and defined benefit pensions.

– Create and maintain a climate of constant disruption and destabilization, with cascading mandates that are impossible to keep up or comply with.

– Create teacher evaluations based on Common Core-related high stakes tests for which no curriculum has been developed. Arbitrarily impose cut scores on those exams that cast students, teachers and schools as failing, as was done by NYS Education Commissioner John King and Regent Meryl Tisch.

– Get teachers and administrators, whether through extortion (see RttT funding) threats or non-stop propaganda, to accept the premises of “data-driven” everything, even when that data is irrelevant, opaque, contradictory, or just plain wrong.

– Get everyone to internalize the premises and language of so-called education reform:

– Parents are not citizens with rights, but “customers” who are provided “choices”
that are in fact restricted to the decisions of those in charge, based on policies
developed by an educational industrial complex made up of foundations,
McKinsey-type consultants and captive academics.

– Students are “valuable assets” and “products,” whose value is to be enhanced
(see the definition of VAM) before being offered to employers.

– Teachers are fungible units of “human capital,” to be deployed as policy-makers
and management see fit. Since human capital depreciates over time, it
needs to be replaced by fresh capital, branded as “the Best and Brightest.”

– Schools are part of an investment “portfolio,” explicitly including the real estate
they inhabit, and are subject to the “demands” of the market and the preferences
of policy-makers and management.

– Create an intimidating, punitive environment, where the questions and qualms are either disregarded or responded to with threats.

– Get the university education programs on board under threat of continuing attack. Once they are on board, go after them anyway, and deregulate the teacher licensing process so that it’s easier to hire temps.

– Eliminate instruction that is deemed irrelevant to the most narrowly-cast labor market needs of employers, getting rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc., thereby reducing the focus of education to preparation for passive acceptance of low-wage employment.

– Embed software and electronic gadgets in every facet of the classroom and school, from reading to test-taking, with the intention of automating as much classroom input and output as possible.

– Use the automation of the classroom to enlarge class size – something explicitly promoted by Bill Gates – and transform teachers into overseers of student digital production that is connected to massive databases, so that every keystroke is data to be potentially monetized.

– Cash your bonus checks, exercise your stock options, and declare Excellence and Civil Rights achieved.

Categories Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Testing

The New York Times Publishes Heidi Reich, a Voice for Teachers!

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2014 //
38

Believe it or not, the Public Editor of the New York Times–the newspaper’s ombudsman–published a letter by teacher Heidi Reich about the flaws of the Common Core. This was amazing and gratifying to see because up until now the “newspaper of record” has failed to print a single story critical of the Common Core or that reflected the views of informed critics, especially teachers. Instead the Times has tried to sell the line that only crazed Tea Party extremists and a handful of leftist extremists question the wisdom of these wonderful national standards.

Heidi Reich’s letter explains the state’s failure to provide support, resources, and guidance for teachers, whose jobs will be tied to test results. She ends her letter in the Times on this note:

“It would be duplicitous for the powers that be to withhold those expectations from us if they were even close to having established them, but we are all too aware that, unfortunately, Pearson and others are scrambling madly to write tests (for billions and billions of dollars) that they have no time to field test, which has already resulted in chaos and utter confusion in lower grades in NY State. My colleagues and I have NO problem holding students to high standards as long as those standards are clearly conveyed to us and as long as we have time to develop appropriate curricula and activities. (We would have used the summer to do this if the standards had been available before September — not happily, but we would have done so.) The current situation is diametrically opposed to that. And I must reiterate my disappointment that The Times, the only paper of record as far as I am concerned, totally missed the point: that parents and students and educators are ALL up in arms about the Common Core, not just extremist politicians on both sides, because to us, the Common Core standards are not even standards. They are vague ideas being developed (for huge personal profit) by billionaires and testing companies, imposed upon teachers, students and parents with complete disregard for education, learning and progress.”

I was especially pleased to see Heidi Reich’s letter, because it was originally written in response to a piece I posted on April 20, called “Why Doesn’t the New York Times Understand the Controversy Over the Common Core?” The post expressed frustration with the insistence by the editorial board, the opinion writers, and the reporters that the Common Core was the best thing ever and that its only critics were extremists. A column by David Brooks, echoing the conventional wisdom framed by Arne Duncan, ridiculed the critics as part of a circus of extremists. The final straw was when a first-page story portrayed the battle over the Common Core as an intramural struggle between “moderate” Jeb Bush, who loves Common Core (but hates public education) and the even more extreme Ted Cruz. My post listed a series of crucial issues that the Times overlooked, while ignoring the voices of teachers, administrators, and parents who had strong concerns a bout the rapid adoption of untested national standards.

Soon after my post was published, a reader recommended that everyone write to the public editor of the New York Times. four hours later, Heidi Reich posted a comment to say that she had done exactly that, explaining why she–an experienced and successful math teacher–was critical of the Common Core. .

This is the comment that Reich posted at 4:27 pm on April 20, and it is very close to what the Times published today.

hreich
April 20, 2014 at 4:27 pm
This is the letter I sent to Ms. Sullivan.

Dear Ms. Sullivan,

I’m writing to express my dismay at the Times’s representation of opposition to the Common Core. I’m sure you have received many letters so far, some from “extremist” politicians, including Republicans and leaders of various teachers’ unions, sure; but others from parents, moderately political teachers and possibly even a student or two. I am a teacher and have been for 15 years which means I am right in the middle of my career. I have been recognized for my teaching by Math for America (I have been a “Master Teacher” for eight or so years now), am locally respected (sorry, no data to support that) and have loved my job for all of these years. Now I find that the nutty wacky whims of the Department of Education under Bloomberg and Klein have been dwarfed by NYS and the federal government’s desire to implement truly difficult standards in a matter of months. We (teachers) are required to write curriculum based on almost NO information, tailor said curriculum to testing about which there are NO data, and still teach our five classes of 34 students a day without skipping a beat.

I imagine you are thinking, why do you need to tailor curriculum to tests, especially if the tests don’t even exist yet? Sure, it has something to do with our jobs being on the line if our students don’t surpass some standard or other (sorry, but to us it all seems just so very arbitrary), but more to the point, no reform means anything until you see what assessment is going to be. We are accustomed to writing our curricula by determining what it is we want our students to be able to do and then designing activities and lessons to convey those expectations and to train students to accomplish goals. It would be duplicitous for the powers that be to withhold those expectations from us if they were even close to having established them, but we are all too aware that, unfortunately, Pearson and others are scrambling madly to write tests (for billions and billions of dollars) that they have no time to field test, which has already resulted in chaos and utter confusion in lower grades in NY State. My colleagues and I have NO problem holding students to high standards as long as those standards are clearly conveyed to us and as long as we have time to develop appropriate curricula and activities. (We would have used the summer to do this if the standards had been available before September — not happily, but we would have done so.) The current situation is diametrically opposed to that. And I must reiterate my disappointment that the NYT, the only paper of record as far as I am concerned, totally missed the point: that parents and students and educators are ALL up in arms about the Common Core, not just extremist politicians on both sides, because to us, the CC standards are not even standards. They are vague ideas being developed (for huge personal profit) by billionaires and testing companies, imposed upon teachers, students and parents with complete disregard for education, learning and progress. And there, Ms. Sullivan, is your story.

Thanks and very best wishes,

Heidi Reich

Congratulations to Heidi Reich! You spoke eloquently for many of us whose views go unnoticed by the New York Times and the mainstream media.

Now, let’s see whether their reporters follow up by writing articles telling the facts about the origins of the Common Core, about the absence of classroom teachers from the writing group for the standards, about the absence of early childhood educators and educators of students with disabilities, about the overrepresentation of employees the testing industry on the writing committee, about why Common Core was quickly adopted by 46 states (to be eligible for the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding), about the criticism by leading scholarly organizations of tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, about the lack of evidence that higher, more rigorous standards produces higher achievement, and about the corporate interests now pushing Common Core. None of these facts are conspiracy theory but all have been neglected by the New York Times, which has faithfully parroted the narrative shaped by the advocates for the Common Core.

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching
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