David Sirota points put the facts that most educators acknowledge: poverty is a far more potent threat to academic success than “bad” teachers or unions. The bugaboos of the loon right have become the basis for federal policy, and it is taking its toll on teacher morale.
Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
North Carolina Watch wants to hear from teachers.
“Happy Friday to all,
I am writing to let you all know that NC Policy Watch just unveiled a new feature on our website, called Your Soapbox, that is seeking to collect North Carolina’s teachers’ stories.
We are doing this because North Carolina’s teachers have watched the state fall from 25th to 46th in the nation in teacher pay since 2008. In July, lawmakers stripped teachers of tenure and salary supplements for those who have obtained master’s degrees.
Educators are also dealing with years of drastic cuts to supplies, textbooks, and teacher assistants.
So we are looking to hear from NC teachers and publish their stories online. We’re looking for written stories that they can submit using the submission form here. If educators have photos to send of their classrooms, please email them to lindsay@ncpolicywatch.com
I can also interview teachers and publish audio files on the Soapbox as well.
Again, the Soapbox link is http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2013/10/30/your-soapbox-on-the-front-lines-educators-stories-inside-and-outside-the-classroom/
I would be grateful if you could let your contacts know.
All the best,
Lindsay”
Lindsay Wagner
Education Reporter
N.C. Policy Watch
224 S Dawson St.
Raleigh, NC 27601
919-861-1460 (office)
919-348-5898 (mobile)
lindsay@ncpolicywatch.com
Twitter: @LindsayWagnerNC
Blog: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org
Website: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com
From Mark NAISON, co-founder of the Badass Teachers Association:
” “This is Crazy”
When policy makers are morally bankrupt, they are forced to rely on bribery and intimidation and the assertion of raw power. This is what we face in Education. Teachers are assailed from multiple directions by public officials who who project a “My Way or the Highway Mentality” while bombarding them with curricula, assessments, evaluations, and new methods of instruction. It takes the joy and creativity out of the work, ratchets up levels of stress, and steals time from the activities students enjoy the most. Many teachers feel what is happening is crazy, but are afraid to say this publicly. That is why we have this group. BATS not only say what most teachers are thinking, we shout if from the Rooftops and say it to policy makers faces.”Your policies are Crazy, you are Crazy, and we are going to fight to protect our colleagues and our students from the damage you are doing.”
There is no more powerful a moral stance than Speaking Truth to Power. That is why we have nearly 31,000 members and show no signs of going away.”
Wherever I go, in every city and state, there are BATS. They are fighting to restore the dignity of the teaching profession. Join them!
I have a simple policy: When you are fighting for your life, you don’t get into battles with the others on your side. There is a long history of doctrinal and personality battles that have split the opposition to those in the highest seats of power. The story of leftwing politics is a history of doctrinal quarrels. My first job when I arrived in New York City was as an editorial assistant at the New Leader magazine, a small magazine of ideas with a history of democratic socialism (i.e., anti-Communism). It was founded by Sol Levitas, who sympathized with the anti-Communist Mensheviks. When I got a job as an editorial assistant at the age of 22, I knew nothing of these quarrels, but over time I learned about not only the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, but the Trotskyites, the Lovestoneites, the Cannonites, the Schachtmanites, and a few other splinter groups. All of this was fascinating to me, a wide-eyed young college graduate who never heard of any of this stuff before arriving at the dusty offices of the New Leader on East 15th street in New York City.
The message I learned was to try, try, try to build a coalition; try not to fight with your allies; try not to get into quarrels over doctrine while your enemies grow stronger, while they feed and encourage your quarrels, and while they gloated as you battled.
That is why I make a point of never criticizing those who are on the side of public education, even when I disagree with them. Maybe someone will find an example where I broke that rule, but that’s what I aspire to. I also try never to get involved in union politics. To begin with, I don’t belong to a union, but to end with, it does us no good to fight internally when the forces we face are so well-armed with money, a rigid ideology, and expensive public relations.
Others don’t agree with me.
In the spirit of open dialogue, I present here a recent exchange of letters between Mercedes Schneider and Randi Weingarten.
Since I admire them both, I would like to see them working together as allies. I hope this exchange brings that day closer.
Thanks to Kipp Dawson of Pittsburgh for drawing my attention to this letter written by Melissa Tomlinson, the teacher who confronted Governor Chris Christie, who shouted her down and said contemptuously, “What do you people want?”
This is her answer, which appeared on Mark Naison’s blog:
Dear Governor Christie,
Yesterday I took the opportunity to come hear you speak on your campaign trail. I have never really heard you speak before except for sound bytes that I get on my computer. I don’t have cable, I don’t read newspapers. I don’t have enough time. I am a public school teacher that works an average of 60 hours a week in my building. Yes, you can check with my principal. I run the after-school program along with my my classroom position. I do even more work when I am at home.
For verification of this, just ask my children.
I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories.
Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response “I want more money for my students.”
Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years. We got into a small debate about how much money has been spent on education. To me, there is never enough money that is spent on education. To invest in education is to invest in our future. We cannot keep short-changing our children and taking away opportunities for them to explore and learn.
As more money is required for state-mandated curriculum changes and high-stakes standardized testing, it is our children that are losing. Programs are being cut all over the state as budget changes are forcing districts to cut music, art, after-school transportation, and youth-centered clubs.
But let’s put money aside for a moment. What do I want? What do ‘we people’ want? We want to be allowed to teach.
Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth?
This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education. I am all for evaluation of a teacher.
I recognize that I should be held accountable for my job. This does not worry me, as long as I am evaluated on my methods of teaching. I can not be held wholly accountable for the learning growth of a student when I am not accountable for all of the factors that influence this growth. Are you aware that poverty is the biggest determination of a child’s educational success. If not, I suggest you read Diane Ravitch’s new book Reign of Error. Take a moment and become enlightened.
Getting back to the issue of money. I am fully aware of our educational budget. Where is all of this money? To me it seems like it is being siphoned right off into the hands of private companies as they reap the benefits of the charter schools and voucher programs that you have put into place. It certainly hasn’t gone to improve school conditions in urban areas such as Jersey City. The conditions that these students and teachers are forced to be in are horrifying. Yet you are not allowing the funds needed to improve these conditions. Are you hoping that these schools get closed down and more students are forced to go to private charter schools while the districts are being forced to pay their tuition? I know for a fact that this is what has happened in Camden and Newark.
Yet these charter schools are not held to the same accountability as our public schools. Why is that? Because deep down you know that you are not really dealing with the issues that influence a child’s education. You are simply putting a temporary band-aid into place.
Unfortunately [for you] that temporary fix is already starting to be exposed as Charter Schools are showing that they actually are not able to do better than public schools. You are setting up teachers to take the blame for all of this. You have portrayed us as greedy, lazy money-draining public servants that do nothing. I invite you to come do my job for one week Governor Christie. I invite you to come see my students, see how little they really have during the school day as they are being forced to keep learning for a single snapshot of their educational worth.
For that one end-all, be-all test, the NJASK. The one that the future of my job and my life is now based upon. Why do you portray schools as failure factories? What benefit do you reap from this? Have you acquired financial promises for your future campaigns as you eye the presidential nomination? Has there been back-room meetings as you agree to divert public funds to private companies that are seeking to take over our public educational system? This is my theory. To accomplish all of this, you are setting up the teachers to take the blame. Unfortunately, you are not the only governor in our country that has this agenda.
What do “we people’ want, Governor Christie? We want our schools back. We want to teach. We want to be allowed to help these children to grow, educationally, socially, and emotionally. We want to be respected as we do this, not bullied.
BadAss Teacher, Melissa Tomlinson
http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2013/11/letter-to-governor-christie-from-new.html
A couple of weeks ago, Bill Keller wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in which he asserted that colleges of education were largely responsible for our national education woes. Leave aside the fact that he knows nothing about the national education issues, but focus instead on his claim that whatever is wrong must be the fault of the ed schools.
Bruce Baker was outraged, as was I.
I have never been a champion of ed schools, but like Baker, I recoiled at Keller’s simplistic thinking. Plenty of smart teachers went to ed schools; are there some bad courses there? Sure. Are there some bad courses in liberal arts colleges? Yes. My own view is that teachers should be solidly grounded in whatever they expect to teach, but they should also learn about how to teach, about child psychology, about how children learn, and about the politics, history, and economics of education. The combination is powerful. But that doesn’t mean that everyone with that combination will be a great teacher.
Baker writes:
But there’s actually a simpler logical fallacy at play here which lies at the root of many reformy arguments regarding causes and consequences – failure to acknowledge that the U.S. has a wide range of elementary and secondary of schools that are both high performing and low performing and that the defining features differentiating higher and lower performing schools are not found primarily in their teachers or the preparation programs they attended – or whether they attended any at all – but rather in the communities they serve, the resources available to them and the backgrounds, health and economic well-being of the children and families they serve.
This is not about the poverty as excuse argument. This is about the simple point that our highest performing public schools also employ teachers from traditional public college and university preparation programs and in many cases, teachers from the same – or substantively overlapping – college and university preparation programs as teachers in our lowest performing schools in the same region.
If that’s the case, then how is it possible that teacher preparation programs are the problem?
It would be wonderful if the New York Times elevated someone to the op-ed page as a columnist who actually knew something about education, like Michael Winerip. Winerip used to have a great weekly column, but was then mysteriously assigned to cover baby-boomers. At present, every columnist on the New York Times opinion pages takes his turn saying absurd things about American education, either because they think they have found a miracle school (which isn’t) or because they have found the ultimate scapegoat (which they haven’t).
Maybe they could hire Bruce Baker and really enlighten the world.
Ever since the Nation at Risk report, we’ve had a reform narrative in this country that begins with the premise that our schools are failing (despite the fact that when one corrects for the socioeconomic level of students taking the international tests on which this claim is based, our students consistently perform at the top or very near the top). Then, the Gates Foundation decided that the “problem” was teacher quality and not having metrics in place to drive improvement in teacher quality. They made this decision based on lousy research that used invalid test scores as the determinant of outcomes.
So, the simple-minded, one-liner for insertion into politicians’ speeches became, “Our schools are failing, and this is because we have lousy teachers.”
This narrative appeals to a lot of authoritarian types on both the left and the right–to all folks who are fond of hierarchies and top-down mandates.
What did the unions do to contribute to the teacher bashing? Well, the two main costs of education are facilities and teacher pay and benefits, and the teachers’ unions negotiate the latter. So, folks on the right who want to control costs–to keep wages and benefits down–and who believe the reform narrative think that the unions have pushed up pay and benefits unnaturally at the very time when teacher quality and educational outcomes have taken a nosedive.
There are three-and-a-half million public school teachers in the U.S. As Jon Stewart pointed out during an interview with Dr. Ravitch, in any profession–fast food customer service–there are going to be some incompetents and some jerks. But the basic current reform narrative–that our schools have failed in general and that teacher quality is, in general, to blame is wrong on both counts.
Can our schools be improved? Can teacher quality be improved? Of course. But here’s the rub: you get what you pay for. If we really want to improve teacher quality, then we have to pay teachers more, we have to raise barriers to entry to the profession, and we need to give teachers lighter loads so that they can do the careful planning, the collaboration, and the mindful self-examination the lead to continuous improvement. And we have to give them more autonomy, for people perform best in conditions of autonomy, which is something that the deformers do not understand AT ALL.
Jake Miller is a teacher who wrote an article for the UK Guardian as a tribute to two teachers who were recently murdered by students.
He was stunned by the tone of the comments that came from many who read his article. They were vicious and anti-teacher. He couldn’t understand it. Why so much anti-teacher sentiment?
He wrote to ask for my advice. I urged him to keep writing. Help the public understand what teachers do.
Write op-eds for the local paper, for Huffington, for Valerie Strauss, for this blog.
I urged him not to read the comments. A staggering number are written by people who blame teachers for whatever went wrong in their lives. Their hatred is palpable. The only place he can publish where he is unlikely to encounter a teacher hater is here. They are not welcome. When they start spewing their venom, I delete them. No haters welcome.
I received this letter from a teacher. She speaks fearlessly and is not afraid to publish her name. She must have tenure. In many states, she would be fired instantly for writing what she believes to be true. We live in a time of lies and distractions. Listen to the experts, those who work with children every day. Our poilcymakers–few of whom have ever worked in a school–don’t trust teachers, don’t listen to teachers. They are ruining the lives of children and calling themselves “reformers.” They are clueless and shameless. Listen to the teachers. Listen to the principals. Listen to those who work with children every day.
Dear Ms. Ravitch,
I wrote this early this morning. I write letters each night because I am unwilling to watch public education be decimated without speaking up on behalf of my present and future students, as well as my four school-age children. I send letters to newspapers, legislators, political appointees, you name it. Most go ignored, but I am undaunted. Thank you for your unprecedented support of public education.
Where did public education reform go awry?
It is easy to blame Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Race to the Top or a political and economic push to privatize public education. But, looking more closely at any of these initiatives, they share a single common denominator. Teachers, those at the front lines with our children, have not been invited to the table.
We are entrusted with students with a wide gamut of challenges, from emotionally disturbed, Tourette’s, ADHD, Schizophrenia and Dyslexia to name a few. We work with students dealing with domestic violence, child abuse, sexual abuse, homelessness, divorce, etc… Through it all, we are entrusted to know and understand state standards, and develop curriculum that meet students’ needs.
In my classroom we have:
o Met Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoon artist Walt Handelsman to help us understand and create editorial content, Dr. John Shea, a Paleolithic Anthropologist who helps us understand how our past is constructed by scientists, authors Ben Mattlin, Dan Gutman and Donna Gephart to inform our reading and writing.
o Worked on a collaborative online project centered based on homelessness.
o Helped purchase land in Haiti, build a school there, and contract with a satellite company to connect the school with the US and Canada.
o Published our own books.
All of which enriched the learning experiences of my students. No one has questioned my classroom performance more than I have.
Enter 2006, the first year my sixth grade students took the New York State ELA. The test was fair. It reflected some of the standards, while lacking reliability and validity testing required by most research instruments.
While the test was fair, what happened with it was not. First, the state decided, after the assessment was administered, what would be considered passing and failing. The bulk of a child’s score was derived from the multiple-choice section, while most of a child’s time on the assessment was spent writing. The assessment did not provide data that could be used to inform instruction.
The first five years of testing taught us a lot. First, the assessment provides no information we do not already have. We know who could read and who cannot. Next, the state arbitrarily raises or lowers the passing bar each year after the assessment is given. One year there was a twelve-point swing in what was considered “proficient”. We also know that the test measures a sliver of the state’s standards. In order to provide a rich and rigorous education, the assessment has to be ignored. If I “taught to the test” we would miss most of the curriculum. It cannot be used to drive instruction, nor be treated as a measurement of a year’s progress. We don’t get the results until students are long gone.
We reported our concerns to our administrators. They met with state education officials several times throughout the year. Each time they returned from a meeting, we heard the same response, “No one is listening.”
By 2009, we were looking at Common Core Standards, and thinking that this time things would be set straight. While working on my doctorate, we were invited to read the standards and offer feedback. They were rigorous, but attainable. We would continue to use our professional knowledge and experience to get to know our students, identify their needs, and devise curriculum that would help our students meet and exceed those standards.
We were wrong.
Without any teachers or administrators, the state hired Pearson to write its first assessment based upon the Common Core State Standards. It was administered earlier this year, and as the New York State Education Commissioner indicated before the tests were sent to schools for administration, 70% of students failed. This assessment:
o Was inconsistent with Common Core Standards in that it did not permit students to spend time with text for close reading (there were far too many passages to read and respond to in the allotted time).
o Included proprietary material from Pearson’s reading series, Reading Street. So districts that purchased Reading Street had an unfair advantage having worked with the material prior to the test.
o Provided no data to parents or teachers that could be used to inform instruction.
o Became a tool for teacher evaluation. My score was a 1 out of 20. No one is able to tell me how my score was derived, what I need to improve upon, etc.…
And still, no one at the state level is listening to teachers.
In New York, the answer to a 70% predetermined failure rate, is curriculum (via its own EngageNY) designed to help students meet the new Common Core Standards. Its first math unit for sixth grade is ratios. Teachers know that ratios require that students have an understanding of other concepts such as fractions, multiplication and division, Greatest Common Factor, etc… These come in a later unit. We are sitting with students who cry, because they believe their inability to understand is indicative of their inability to do math.
We have placed public education in the hands of political appointees and legislators who lack public teaching experience. While we argue over who is right or wrong, students are sitting in classes, where the entire curriculum has been turned upside down. We need to start this curriculum shift in kindergarten. We need to rely upon teachers, child development experts, parents AND political appointees to raise standards and design assessments that measure student and teacher progress in real time.
I speak for many teachers who believe in the integrity of our work and the needs of our students. We embrace high standards and evaluations that measure student and teacher progress. It is time to invite us to the table to devise a strategy to take three great ideas –Common Core Standards, student assessment and teacher evaluations and make them help students not hurt them.
You may publish any / all of it. The guidelines for submitting to newspapers state that the material cannot appear elsewhere, but am confident after two years of letter writing that we do not have to worry about them wanting to publish this. My name, where I teach, etc… do not have to be hidden.
Thank you, sincerely,
Melissa McMullan
6th Grade Teacher
JFK Middle School
http://www.comsewogue.k12.ny.us/webpages/mmcmullan/
https://www.facebook.com/MrsMcmullansClassPage
“No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.” ~ Amelia Earhart
A teacher left this comment on the blog:
I am a teacher and PARENTS have everything to do with joining the dialogue on education (http://parentsacrossamerica.org/ ). And the teachers I see day in and day out want to know what parents think, what they see and hear from their children outside the school environment… we desperately want parents to understand what “reforms” are requiring of teachers nowadays… and that we teachers have not been part of the process at all! Any teachers (as well as “corporate ed reformers” like John King demonstrated in Poughkeepsie) who do not want your observations should be suspect! As far as setting policy, current “ed reformers” have worked hard to “sell their product” to parents via a very tight and highly organized PR machine that works relentlessly through the media and they have worked equally hard at keeping public school teachers away from policy setting dialogue. Someone commented that everyone always brings up the “medicine analogy”… i.e. just because we go to a doctor does not mean we should be setting medical policy etc… Well, everyone has a role to play in setting medical policy – some roles are direct and some less so. A patient can certainly let the medical community know things that do not work so well from a patient perspective and this will help set policy as to how patients should be dealt with so they feel comfortable. But do we want the patient to determine how the MRI machine is operated? Or how much anesthesia should be given to a patient? Sure hope not! Bill Gates, David Coleman, Eli Broad and a host of others have way over-stepped their bounds by creating and implementing education policy!
As a teacher, I dream of parents, students, teachers and fed up administrators joining hands and putting a stop to the “educational” abuse of our nation’s youth through “corporate ed reform” policies. If your child used to love school but no longer is excited about it, if your child is throwing up the night before a high stakes test or getting sick and not wanting to go to school during high stakes testing season… or is afraid to express an opinion on something for fear of “being wrong” or spending way too much time on a take home “vacation packet” designed to help them do better on high stakes tests thus having a stressful “vacation week” at Christmas etc…, join teachers in fighting the nonsense of corporate “ed reform” and find ways to get fellow parents to join in. I sure wish the middle and upper class parents whose students are failing under common core would realize and join hands with low income parents whose students have been suffering a lot longer due to the high stakes tests pre “common core” that their students struggle to pass.
So LT in addition to the cite referenced above http://parentsacrossamerica.org … also take a look at this cite:http://unitedoptout.com/
Diane Ravitch's blog 