A reader in North Carolina reflects on the Legislature’s
many punishments imposed on teachers: “As a teacher in NC, I am
disappointed yet not surprised by the recent cuts. Another year
without a raise while our health insurance premiums continue to
rise, the demand increases, leadership decreases, and class size
balloons. The people who make the most money on the district and
state level are so disconnected from the daily operations of the
classroom, that they have no idea what it means to teach. I have
never been so discouraged in my professional life. If an
exceptional teacher can not earn enough income to support his or
her family, then they will undoubtedly leave the system. And then
who is left to teach the children…..NC should think about
this…”
This teacher left a powerful comment about how he
became
educated about real life by teaching. The myths
he had learned in
his youth fell away when confronted
by the children whose lives are
burdened by poverty.
Please tweet this comment. It should go viral.
Add your
voice. This reader said in a comment: “People harass me
for talking about poverty all the time. I come from a middle
class,
white family, and I was sheltered away from the
poor and needy. I
attended a middle class and upper
class private school just south
of Detroit. “After
teaching in public schools since the late 90’s
(and
having never walked in one until I began to teach), I now the
see the world I was sheltered from. It is a world of poverty.
“I
agree that people should be responsible, but when
the game is
rigged, even responsible people falter in
finding work. Once the
jobs are gone, families suffer,
and this seemingly “responsible
behavior” becomes a
smoke and mirrors argument. “Public schools
essentially
saved me from the closed mindedness that comes from
this conservative mindset. I understand now what we need. We
need
strong public services (including education),
strong labor unions,
and a government not run by
corporations. “Shame on my family for
raising me to
believe I was something special, and everybody else
was
not because they were not willing to work as hard as I was.
What a crock.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/18/1111575/-Two-Americas”
This teacher in North Carolina has an invitation for the
legislators cutting the schools’ budget and the pundits who applaud
them: Walk
in our shoes.
She writes: “I’d like to put out a call to
every politician who had a hand in passing NC’s new budget. To
every policy maker who thinks this is a good (or even just
acceptable) idea.
To every parent forsaking public education.
To every taxpayer lamenting the “waste” of money that our schools are
in their minds. I’d like to challenge you to walk a day in our
shoes.
“Walk the halls in the scuffed up loafers of the high school
teacher who has been required to write his own textbook, because
there’s no money to buy them. “Sit on the carpet in the polka
dotted flats of the 2nd grade teacher tasked with teaching 25
students all day with no teacher assistant. Oh, and did I mention
that 4 are gifted, 5 have disabilities, 8 speak English as a second
language, and 15 live in poverty?
“Follow a child with behavioral
problems down the hallway in the well-worn Keds of the special ed
teacher who fights for appropriate services for her students,
because the law says they are entitled to a “free and appropriate
public education,” but the people with the money just keep saying
they can’t fund what she needs.
“Conduct awhile in the shiny black
shoes of the band teacher purchasing sheet music and instrument
repairs with his own paycheck. “Clean the green slime off of the
Sperrys of the middle school teacher who has to stop his after
school science club because there are no funds for materials.
“Walk out the door at 6pm in the sandals of the third year teacher, still
bright-eyed and hopeful that her 55 hour week makes a difference.
Then, kick them off as she sits down for two hours of research and
paper-writing, diligently putting in the work to earn an advanced
degree that will no longer provide her any hope of increasing her
$32,000 salary.
“Please, come find us. Come walk in our shoes. See
what you’ve left us with, and let’s see if YOU can ensure that
every third grader can read, that every student graduates high
school college and career ready. Because we can’t. And we aren’t a
group of people that often admit there’s something we can’t do.
We can cause light bulbs to turn on inside little minds. We can inspire a
love of historical facts. We can make any math concept relevant to
real life. We can love a child who doesn’t know what that feels
like, and we can show them that they can learn.
But to do all of this without sufficient funds, sufficient staff, and, most of all,
sufficient appreciation and respect, is simply becoming too tall of
an order.
So you give it a try. Then let’s talk.”
In response to a
post about a teacher’s last day of teaching first grade,
this retired teacher wrote the following: I read this
while sitting on the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and soon was
sobbing uncontrollably. My husband returned from the deck, saw me
reading on my phone and asked if someone died. It’s been one year
since I retired after 34 years of teaching. Last Day’s letter
rekindled all the powerful mixed emotions I felt on my last day-
tremendous relief that I could leave just before the CC and its
testing arrived in full force, and heartache at leaving my middle
schoolers and the magic that happened in the classroom. And there
is grieving and loss. So, yes, I told my husband- something is
dying. Teachers and students connected in the joy and intensity of
learning together will be a dying art if the scripted, robotic
factories take over. Like First Day, I’m now retired but still a
teacher. My new job is to fight against the
machines.
This is a letter from Arthur Goldstein to his colleagues at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, New York. Arthur is chapter chair of his school, where he teaches English language learners. He also had a terrific blog called NYC Educator.
This is what he told the staff about the new teacher evaluation system:
Dear colleagues:
Today our Measures of Student Learning Committee met to decide precisely how thoroughly invalid junk science measures will be used to rate teachers in Francis Lewis High School. We had several choices. We based our choices on the information available to us, which was very little.
Our first choice was whether to use goal or growth measures. We were told that goal measures entailed inventing tests or projects. These tests or projects would then be sent to the insane ideologues at the NYC Department of Education who would set goals. The goals could have been different for individual students, which could mean ringing 170 different bells.
Were you to disagree with the goals set by the DOE, you would have the option of submitting reasons and appealing to the principal, who would either deny your appeal or submit your reasons and appeal to the DOE for reconsideration.
Given the tremendous amount of work we have ahead of us this year, we opted for growth models, although we have little or no idea how they will be calculated. For state measures, some were mandated to reflect individual classes of teachers. In those cases, we opted to have department results reflect the local measures. In other words, your department Regents results could be the local measures. This would reflect not only the exams in areas you teach, but those given by your entire department. For example, if you teach algebra, the results in geometry and trigonometry will also be part of your local measures.
We aimed, in general, to make measures as broad as possible. Wherever possible, we tried to avoid competition between teachers and groups of teachers. We do not want teachers to feel they would be hurting themselves by, for example, tutoring students of their colleagues.
If there was a state exam and individual class results were not mandated, your department results were your growth measure. In those cases, we opted to have the local measure be your department results. In this system, if the state measure was also department results, local growth would be measured by the lowest third of your department results. Because there is no logic, rhyme or reason to this system, we were prohibited from using the same standard twice.
If your subject, like music, art, or physical education, does not have a state assessment, your evaluation would be based on schoolwide state tests. Your local evaluation would be based on the lowest third of schoolwide state tests.
We did not have the option of evaluating what teachers actually do, as the geniuses in Albany and DC, many of whom send their children to private schools where this nonsense does not apply, appear to have determined that teachers teach tests rather than students.
We will discuss this further when we meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m afraid I have no more details than these on this system. However, we will revisit it next year, by which time we’ll hopefully have a better idea on what does and does not work in our school.
Let me be clear—I hate this system and virtually everything about it. But as our union leadership had a hand in writing the law imposing this on us, and as John King had carte blanche to impose pretty much whatever reformy nonsense he saw fit, we are stuck with it.
We will make the best of it, and work to bring sanity in education back to our city and state soon. Sadly, that won’t be happening this year.
Best regards,
Arthur
This reader responds to the findings
of the PDK/Gallup poll, which showed a shift in public
opinion against testing, against using test scores to evaluate
teachers, and against public release of teacher personnel files and
ratings. “We said last year that we had a lot of hard work to do,
to inform and educate the parents we work with, to organize
communities and form effective coalitions of resistance…We said
it was going to be a herculean task. For the past year we each have
been busy doing just that. (I held a series of advocatcy workshps
for parents at my school, with my principal’s blessing) We have
been relentless promoting our cause in the media and on the
internet…constant unrelenting communicating and informing, always
learning. Knowledge is power. “Now we discover that since last
year, the percentages have shifted in favor of teachers, teacher
concerns and Public Education. I ask you, “Who said American public
educators are not effective teachers?” Just look at what we have
accomplished in a year! “We are AMAZING educators and incredible
motivators…Congratulations everyone (((cheers)))
(((applause)))… “Now we need to keep at it until every classroom
in our great nation is FREE of the corporate influence. Keep active
educating other teachers and supporting parents and encouraging
students to organize…the battle is shifting in our favor and it
is a battle, but the war is far from over. We can do
this!”
The New York Times has a good debate this morning about the value of experience for teaching.
The debate was prompted by a very controversial article last week in which charter leaders claimed that two or three years of teaching was good enough, and that they liked the constant turnover of bright inexperienced teachers. The title of the article actually referred teachers who had a “short career by choice,” though some might say that what these young people had was a job or a temp position. A career normally refers to a commitment, not an experience.
Most extraordinary was this statement:
“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”
None of these young teachers will stay around long enough to be evaluated. How will we know if they are “great”?
Education debates in D.C. and the media tend to be
dominated by what economists and think tanks say. What is needed
most and seldom heard is the voice of teachers. Here is a brilliant
new voice that should get as much air time as Bill Gates, Joel
Klein, and Arne Duncan. What are the chances? In
this article at Salon, John Savage describes his
experience teaching at J.E. Pearce Middle School in Austin, Texas,
which the state education commissioner called “the worst school” in
the state. Why was it the worst school in Texas? Savage considers
the reformer thesis: Teachers with high expectations can work
miracles. This is the line from Michelle Rhee and Teach for
America. Savage quickly dashes that fantasy–or his experience
dashed it. He writes: “In the last decade a new species of
educational reformer has captured the public’s attention. Talk
show-friendly celebrities like former Washington, D.C., Schools
Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and award-winning movies like “Waiting
for Superman,” have gained fame by blaming teachers for the
achievement gap between poor students and middle-class students.
“The appeal of this educational axiom — ascribing student
achievement to teacher quality — is understandable. It suggests a
silver bullet solution: improve teaching and you improve test
scores, especially for poor students. And because test results
predict life outcomes — the likelihood of securing a job, getting
divorced, going to prison—better teaching can lift students from
poverty. Or so the thinking goes. “Some have called this narrative
the myth of magical teaching. We yearn to believe it. We yearn to
think that caring, hardworking teachers can change the world, or at
least their students’ lives. Like American Exceptionalism and
Horatio Alger stories, this supposition has become part of our
national mythology. As an idealistic young educator I, too, gladly
accepted the myth of the magical teacher as reality — that is,
before Pearce shattered my naïveté.” He discovered: “Here is the
hard truth about my experience: I didn’t have much of an impact.
Sure, I made a small part of the day more pleasant for some
students, but I didn’t change the course of any of my kids’ lives,
much less the nature of the school. A middle-class teacher coming
into a low-income school and helping poor students realize their
true potential makes for an excellent White Savior Film, but
“Dangerous Minds” isn’t real life. Real life at Pearce is
survival.” Reform after reform came and went: “We have poured money
into high-poverty schools, and we have replaced entire teaching
staffs, but to little avail. Teachers aren’t the problem, poverty
is. Moreover, segregating our poorest students in high-poverty
schools, as we often do, exacerbates the problem. “After parsing
fourth-grade math scores, education theorist Richard Khalenberg
concluded, “low-income students attending more affluent schools
scored almost two years ahead of low-income students in
high-poverty schools. Indeed, low-income students given a chance to
attend more affluent schools performed more than half a year
better, on average, than middle-income students who attend
high-poverty schools.” “If socioeconomic status is a primary driver
of academic performance, and if student achievement suffers in
high-poverty schools, why do we continue to organize schools in a
way that predetermines some for failure and then blame teachers?
“There are ways we can make education better for all students —
socioeconomic school integration, investing in early childhood
education, providing the wraparound services students need — but a
myopic focus on teacher quality won’t fundamentally improve
schools.”
Bill Gates has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in
search of an answer to the question: “What makes a good teacher?”
Arne Duncan, building on his record in Chicago, knows what makes a
good teacher: It is the teacher who raises test scores, and he has
spent billions of dollars to induce every state to agree with him.
Here, the students of Madison,
Connecticut explain what makes a good teacher. What do
they look for? Someone who is kind and patient. Someone who helps them. Someone who encourages them. There, that was easy, and it
didn’t cost billions of dollars.
Paul Thomas here describes how Mick Zais, state superintendent of South Carolina, misleads the public about the condition of education in his state, about how schools succeed, and what is needed to help them improve.
Having found a high-poverty district that has higher-than-expected test scores, Zais uses this district to push the corporate reform agenda: Success is all about merit pay and “no excuses.”
A great teacher can supply 18 months of “knowledge” in only one academic year, as measured by standardized tests, which we know are great ways to assess “knowledge.”
This is the usual reformy nonsense, which has never stood up to scrutiny.
Paul Thomas taught high school for 18 years in South Carolina and is now preparing teachers at Furman University in South Carolina.
He is an amazingly prolific scholar, and his deep experience informs his scholarship.
Diane Ravitch's blog 