Professor Celia Oyler has started her own blog, called “Outrage on the Page.”
She is a teacher educator at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been a brave critic of “reform”
She has opened her blog to a anonymous guest blogger, who explains why so many are offended by Chancellor Merryl Tisch’s efforts to defend high-stakes testing.
John Merrow posted an important reflection on the broader issues raised by the Atlanta cheating scandal.
““Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote in 1919 in ‘The Second Coming.’ Yeats was describing the world after the Great War, but it aptly describes American education today[1]: polarized, shouting at, but rarely listening to, each other. We disagree about dozens of issues: the Common Core; whether ‘opting out’ of the Common Core tests is appropriate (or even legal); the role of unions; the effectiveness of charter schools; the federal role; the amount of standardized testing; how to evaluate teachers; poverty’s impact on children’s learning, and more.
“Now, out of the blue, we have two[2] points of agreement: 1) Draconian punishment for the Atlanta cheaters is unjust, unseemly and counter-productive; and 2) students are the losers when adults cheat….”
“Everybody’s got a villain, whether it’s Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top; an obsession with ‘data-driven decision-making; education profiteers; greedy teacher unions; or a right wing vendetta against those same unions. [5]
“Can’t we agree on something else? I suggest two big ideas that everyone who is genuine about putting kid first can support. One, expose hypocrites and hypocrisies, wherever they may be. Two, school spending should be transparent, because we are talking about taxpayer dollars, and sunlight is the best disinfectant.
“Of course, the two are related, because hypocrisy often involves money and secrecy.
“To me, the biggest hypocrites are those who preach, “Poverty can never be offered as an excuse” (for poor student performance) but then do nothing to alleviate poverty and its attendant conditions. What they are saying, bottom line, is “It’s the teachers’ fault” when kids in poverty-ridden schools do poorly on tests or fail to graduate…..
“OK, poverty is not an excuse, but surely substandard housing, inadequate health care, poor nutrition, abuse and abandonment (all of which are more likely in high poverty areas) are factors in poor academic performance. So why are these hypocrites either standing by silently or actively opposing efforts to alleviate poverty and thereby improve the lives of students outside of school?….
“Even if these so-called “thought leaders” genuinely believe that poverty is not an excuse, shouldn’t they be outraged that most states are actively making things worse for poor kids [6]? At least 30 states are systematically shortchanging poor areas when they distribute education dollars, as the Hechinger Report made clear recently. “The richest 25 percent of school districts receive 15.6 percent more funds from state and local governments per student than the poorest 25 percent of school districts, the federal Department of Education pointed out last month. That’s a national funding gap of $1,500 per student,” Jill Barshay reports.”……
“We might want to start the investigation with charter schools, both the for-profit and the non-profit varieties [8] (because, when it comes to money, they’re almost indistinguishable). Rarely do they disclose how they spend their public tax dollars. And why should they, when their political enablers don’t demand it?
“I hope you are following Marian Wang’s reporting on this issue for Pro Publica. She documents how some charter operators are laughing all the way to the bank, taking your dollars to put in their accounts….
Merrow then describes an egregious case of charter profiteering, which he brought to the attention of Nina Rees, the Executive Director of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (who formerly worked for Dick Cheney and Michael Milken).
Merrow asked her in a letter:
“What I wonder is how many Charter Management Organizations [9] are playing fast and loose with the system. Here’s one case in point: We are looking into a CMO that is growing; its records indicate that its President owns the building his charter schools operate in, and so he bill the CMO for rent—a hefty sum. The CMO pays him a salary, a 16% management fee and an additional 7% or so for ‘professional development’ for the staff. In recent years he has added categories, notably ‘back office & support’ for nearly $300,000 and ‘miscellaneous equipment rent’ for $317,000. In FY 2008 he billed for $2.6M, but in FY 2012 the number climbed to $4.1M. His 5-year total is $15.8M….and he’s a CMO, not an EMO.
“We have a number of other examples, which prompts my questions: who’s minding the store, and whose responsibility is it?
“Is it the role of national organizations like yours to set standards for transparency? State politicians? I have no idea but would love to hear your thoughts.”
She said this was the authorizers’ responsibility.
Merrow summarized her response:
“She seems to be saying that her national organization bears no responsibility for policing the charter movement, for pushing states to write tighter rules, or for calling out the profiteers. That’s someone else’s job.”
And his last suggestion:
“Remedial education” is another money pit. Follow the money, you will discover that big bucks being spent on remedial education at every level, and, while some kids get ‘remediated,’ the situation never changes. The adults in charge may be wonderful, likeable human beings, but their jobs depend on a steady stream of failed students, meaning that they do not have a stake in fixing the system. I wrote about this three years ago when I announced that I was leaving PBS [10] to make my fortune in remedial education.
“Follow the money: How many millions of the $100 million Mark Zuckerberg donated to ‘fix’ Newark’s public schools have gone to consultants? How much money goes into the trough labeled ‘professional development’ and is never seen again? How much are school systems spending on highly paid central office staff ($100K+ per year) whose job it is to go watch teachers they don’t trust to do their jobs? How much of the increase in college costs is directly attributable to spending on administrators? Quite a lot, according to the New York Times.
“Schools would be improved if we’d agree to: Follow the money. Call out the hypocrites. Demand transparency. And stop blaming teachers.”
A wonderful column!
Pasi Sahlberg, the great Finnish educator who is teaching this year at Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote recently to explain how Finnish universities select future teachers.
Finnish universities are famously selective,accepting only 10% of the high school graduates who want to become teachers. But how do they select? Sahlberg’s very bright niece was turned down when she first applied.
So what is the selection process?
Sahlberg writes:
“Who exactly are those who were chosen to become primary teachers in Finland ahead of my niece? Let’s take closer look at the academic profile of the first-year cohort selected at the University of Helsinki. The entrance test has two phases. All students must first take a national written test. The best performers in this are invited on to the second phase, to take the university’s specific aptitude test. At the University of Helsinki, 60% of the accepted 120 students were selected on a combination of their score on the entrance test and their points on the subject exams they took to complete their upper-secondary education; 40% of students were awarded a study place based on their score on the entrance test alone.
“Last spring, 1,650 students took the national written test to compete for those 120 places at the University of Helsinki. Applicants received between one and 100 points for the subject exams taken to earn upper-secondary school leaving diplomas. A quarter of the accepted students came from the top 20% in academic ability and another quarter came from the bottom half. This means that half of the first-year students came from the 51- to 80-point range of measured academic ability. You could call them academically average. The idea that Finland recruits the academically “best and brightest” to become teachers is a myth. In fact, the student cohort represents a diverse range of academic success, and deliberately so.
“A good step forward would be to admit that academically best students are not necessarily the best teachers
If Finnish teacher educators thought that teacher quality correlates with academic ability, they would have admitted my niece and many of her peers with superior school performance. Indeed, the University of Helsinki could easily pick the best and the brightest of the huge pool of applicants each year, and have all of their new trainee teachers with admirable grades.
“But they don’t do this because they know that teaching potential is hidden more evenly across the range of different people. Young athletes, musicians and youth leaders, for example, often have the emerging characteristics of great teachers without having the best academic record. What Finland shows is that rather than get “best and the brightest” into teaching, it is better to design initial teacher education in a way that will get the best from young people who have natural passion to teach for life.
“The teaching profession has become a fashionable topic among education reformers around the world. In England, policy-makers from David Cameron down have argued that the way to improve education is to attract smarter people to be teachers. International organisations such as the OECD and McKinsey & Company, Sir Michael Barber for Pearson, and in the US, Joel Klein, former New York education chancellor now working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, have all claimed that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. These are myths and should be kept away from evidence-informed education policies and reforms.
“A good step forward would be to admit that the academically best students are not necessarily the best teachers. Successful education systems are more concerned about finding the right people to become career-long teachers. Oh, and what happened to my niece? She applied again and succeeded. She graduated recently and will be a teacher for life, like most of her university classmates.”
The Néw York Times said that teacher turnover at the Success Academy charter schools is more than 50%. Eva Moskowitz says it is 17%.
Matt de Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute has the raw data, and he says they are both wrong.
I have sometimes wished it were possible to have a completely candid conversation with a teacher at a Success Academy charter school. Last week, with no advance planning, it happened.*
A young man who is related to me asked if he could introduce me to his friend, Ms. Smith (a pseudonym). He told me she teaches at Success and wanted to meet me. I said, “Of course.”
I had no idea what the evening had in store. I have talked to SA teachers before, always in public, not in the privacy of home, and they were always pleasant, neither boastful nor defensive.
When they arrived, I opened a bottle of white wine and broke open a box of macaroons. “Betty” (that’s not her name either) told me that she had worked at SA for five years. She teaches fifth grade.
What is it like, I asked.
She said she loves the children, but the atmosphere is stifling for both teachers and children. She is looking for another job. Everything is about test scores, and the competitive pressure never lets up. Right now, they are getting ready for the state exams, and signs posted everywhere say “Slam the Exams!”
I asked how long the test prep went on, and she said they have been doing test prep for months. She said the kids would not take spring vacation until the exams were finished.
What’s so bad about test prep, I asked her. She said some of the kids explode or break down. They are very young, and the pressure gets to be too much for them. They might start screaming or crying, and they have to be removed from the classroom until they calm down. The children are assigned a color depending on their test scores, and every classroom posts the names of the children and their color–red, green, blue, or yellow. I forget which is best and which is worst, but the goal is to shame the lowest performing students so they try harder to move up into the next level.
The test prep plus the ” no-excuses” climate of tough and strictly enforced rules unnerves some children, she said. And she felt badly for the children who were humiliated. The harshly competitive environment, she said, was dispiriting and joyless.
What happens with the children who can’t adjust to the highly disciplined demands of the school, I asked. She replied that these children might be suspended repeatedly or their parents or guardian might be called to the school every day. Day after day. Eventually, the child’s parent or guardian will withdraw the child because they can’t afford to miss work every day.
She realized she had had enough. The money was good, she said, but the stress was exhausting. She was also troubled by the non-stop political propaganda campaign. This year, she didn’t get on the bus with thousands of others to go to Albany and demand more money so the chain could expand. She didn’t like the way the children, parents, and teachers were being used as political pawns.
When I told her that none of the eighth grade students who had attended Success Academy had passed the competitive exams to enter the elite high schools of NYC, either last year or this year, she was momentarily surprised. Then, she said, that explains why Success Academy is opening its own high school.
Our conversation continued for more than a hour. It was clear that the scales had fallen from her eyes. She felt certain that the hedge fund managers bankrolling SA charters know nothing about the children, nor do they care about them. They want to win. They want high scores, period. Just like Wall Street. They want to be able to say at cocktail parties and dinner parties that “my school” got higher test scores than “your school.”
Why have you stayed this long, I asked her. I love the kids, she replied. She said someday she hopes to work for a nonprofit that won’t require her to sacrifice her ethics and principles.
*I thought this story was a real scoop, but then Kate Taylor of the New York Times beat me to it with this story.
Blogger Perdido Street discovered an astonishing part of the newly adopted New York state budget. If a teacher should change his or her address and fails to notify the State Education Department, he or she will be subject to “a moral character review” by the state.
Certificate holders shall notify the department of any change of name or mailing address within thirty days of such change. Willful failure to register or provide such notice within one hundred eighty days of such change may constitute grounds for moral character review under subdivision seven of section three hundred five of this chapter.
Words fail me.
It is understandable that Governor Cuomo has a grudge against teachers: they didn’t endorse him in last fall’s campaign. So, naturally, he wants to destroy the teaching profession in his state by imposing a burdensome, invalid teacher evaluation system, written by his staff to inflict maximum pain on every teacher.
If he acted like an angry bully, the Legislature acted like fools.
Why did the Legislature go along? Many legislators said they voted reluctantly and “with a heavy heart.” Others made statements showing they didn’t really know what they voted for. The backlash has been fierce from parents and teachers.
In this article, principal Carol Burris shows how thoughtless and mean-spirited this legislation is.
She writes:
“The New York State legislature celebrated the Eve of April Fools by making a bad teacher evaluation system even worse. With the exception of a few principled members, the rest of the Senate and Assembly fell in line, without care or concern for the consequences their “reform” would bring. More remarkably, by the time debate was done, it was obvious that many legislators had no understanding of what they were voting into law.”
Testing will count for 50%. Principals will be sent to evaluate other principals’ staff.
“Of one thing you can be certain. The NYSED created growth-score and measures will produce a bell-curve. This will produce the “differentiation” that the chancellor and governor crave. You can also bet these scores will not be a valid or reliable measure of teacher performance. After all, that is the hallmark of APPR.
“The other half of the evaluation will be the result of two required and one optional observation. One required observation must be done by a teacher’s administrator or principal, and the other by an “independent” evaluator from outside the building. When school officials complained that using outside observers was an unfunded mandate, the glib reply was just swap administrators among schools.
“Let’s think about that plan. For districts like mine with one high school, swapping administrators might mean that the elementary principal would observe our IB Physics teacher and I would watch a kindergarten class. Without any knowledge of the curriculum, students, and the teacher, we would do a high-stakes observation.
“As we principals go on the road to observe teachers in other schools, we would leave our students and teachers without leadership if a crisis were to occur. This would be especially difficult in some areas of rural New York, where schools are far apart. With observations an hour in length, pre- and post-observation conferences and travel time, schools would be without their principals for days given the number of observations we are now required to do. Apparently the governor is not worried. When parents call and I am observing a teacher across town, I will tell my assistant to forward the call to him.”
The legislators should not make excuses. They should be ashamed of themselves and repeal this punitive and unworkable plan.
Parents are right to be outraged. This is another reason to opt out.
Who will want to teach in Néw York?
Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania says that teacher turnover costs schools more than $2.2 billion annually.
“One of the reasons teachers quit, he says, is that they feel they have no say in decisions that ultimately affect their teaching. In fact, this lack of classroom autonomy is now the biggest source of frustration for math teachers nationally.”
Ingersoll, who has studied teacher recruitment and retention for many years, says:
“We actually don’t have a lot of research on the decision to stay or not. But we have a lot of data on the flip side: why teachers move to other schools or leave the profession. For example, beginning teachers are more likely to drop out. Those from top colleges — the most selective colleges and universities — are more likely to drop out. And we know that minority teachers are more likely to drop out than white, non-Hispanic teachers.
“But most of the turnover is driven by school conditions. Salary is not the main thing. It’s important, but not the main thing. And that’s an important finding because the teaching force is so large — it’s now America’s largest occupation — that raising everyone’s salaries is a very expensive proposition.
“What are some of the important factors driving the decision to stay or leave?
“One of the main factors is the issue of voice, and having say, and being able to to have input into the key decisions in the building that affect a teacher’s job. This is something that is a hallmark of professions. It’s something that teachers usually have very little of, but it does vary across schools and it’s very highly correlated with the decision whether to stay or leave.
“I’ve worked with these data a lot going back last couple of decades. Where nationally, large samples of teachers are asked, “How much say does the faculty collectively have?” And, “How much leeway do you have in your classroom over a series of issues?” It turns out both levels are really important for decisions whether to stay or to part. And what’s interesting about this finding [is that] this would not cost money to fix. This is an issue of management…..
“One thing we’ve found is that the shrinking classroom autonomy is now the biggest dissatisfaction of math teachers nationally. And this has been a growing issue for math teachers and it’s no doubt tied to the testing and accountability environment where math is one of the main subjects tested. This is a far bigger factor for math teachers than, for instance, salaries. This is the biggest complaint nationally of math teachers. This shrinking autonomy…..”
This budget bill includes very detailed provisions that determine how teachers and principals in New York state should be evaluated. Needless to say, it was written by non-educators. Have any of them ever evaluated a teacher? Doubtful. Some of the details of implementation will be turned over to the State Education Department or the Board of Regents, but some features are clear: No teacher can be rated effective if he or she is rated ineffective on student performance (test scores). The state will require that every teacher be evaluated by an independent person who does not work in the school. How many thousands of evaluators will be hired? What will it cost? Who will pay? No one knows. It is not in the budget. What value is the opinion of someone who observes a teacher or principal for an hour or a few minutes? This is a bill that is written to oust teachers. It reeks of disrespect. It shows Governor Cuomo’s rage against the people who work with children in public schools every day. This bill is his payback to the teachers’ unions for not endorsing his re-election after he declared himself the lobbyist for charter students (3% of the state’s enrollment). Ironically (or not), many outraged teachers are blaming their union leaders for not fighting this bill. To be sure, it would not have passed without the votes of Assembly Democrats, many of whom said they were voting for it “with a heavy heart.” Just how heavy their hearts were cannot be measured, sort of like trying to measure true learning and true education. Enrollments in teacher education programs are collapsing, in New York and across the nation. Those who enter teaching today are either woefully uninformed of the politicians’ hostility towards them or are prepared to fight a long battle for their children and their profession. What kind of society makes war on its teachers?
Mark Naison of Fordham University writes:
When Democracy Died in the New York State Assembly
Something inside me died tonight in the New York State Assembly. Democratic legislator after Democratic legislator, some who claimed to be lifelong friends of public education, some who were once teachers themselves, caved in and voted for a bill that was going to add to the test burden on the already over tested children of the state, subject teachers to more scripting and more intimidation than they already had to endure and strip power away from principals and local school districts.
Many knew what they voted for was wrong. Many said so in their remarks. But they caved in and voted for a measure that was going to make the lives of their constituents miserable, our of fear, cowardice and a refusal to consider how their actions might look in the broad sweep of historical events
And their actions alerted me to something I had feared for some time. That the voices of ordinary citizens had become so smothered by the power of great wealth that all social policies were now held hostage to the pursuit of private gain. That political leaders, irrespective of political party, no longer felt a moral imperative to consider the “public good;” that they could pay lip service to that ideal in communicating with constituents, but when the chips were down, they would always vote for the interests of the rich and powerful.
I had used certain language, I once though loosely, to describe our current predicament. Words like “Oligarchy” and “Plutocracy.”
Tonight, I realized that those terms were rather precise descriptions of our current political arrangements
The interests of the children, the families, the teachers, the principals and the elected school board of our state were treated as impediments to a vision of educational transformation that handed power and funding over to private interests whose contributions filled the campaign coffers of officials of both parties. That such a give away of power and money took place in a Budget bill that included “ethics reform” made it all the more ironic
This was one of the most blatant displays of political cynicism and political corruption that I have seen in my lifetime.
It was quite literally sickening
I mourn for the children. I mourn for the teachers. I mourn for the principals. I mourn for the schools that will be closed; the school districts that will be taken into receivership.
And I mourn for the democratic spirit, which has disappeared from the political culture of the state and nation in which I live.
I will never accept this as the norm. I will never accommodate to cowardice and evil
And I will not be alone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 