An Urban Teacher's Education

GO WATCH THIS IMMEDIATELY!!!!

2012-05-20T15:48:00.000-04:00

Last July, I had the privilege to attend a session led by Curtis Acosta (one of the teachers of the ethnic studies program recently banned by the Tucson Unified School District) at the SOS conference in DC. I noted it as the highlight of my conference experience. In the session, participants had the opportunity to view a documentary on the ethnic studies program called Precious Knowledge. I am ecstatic that everyone can now go watch the documentary for free until June 7. I've embedded it below, or you can go here.

Please watch this and share it widely.

Watch Precious Knowledge on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

How Did I Get This Way!?!?

2012-05-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

I finished writing my last post, and it hit me: I'm the guy I used to wish I'd never turn into.

When I started teaching, I approached it with the energy of a five-year-old on a recent bowl of frosted flakes. I obsessed over my teaching like a doctor charged with finding the cure to an epidemic.

But here I am, six years later, saying that "I am decidedly unwilling to do everything in my power to ensure every child's success." What the hell happened?

I thought about it for a while, and I realized that my blog is a pretty valuable resource for assessing how and why I've made this transformation.

Check it out.

Example 1: Here is me in June of 2009, having just been hired to teach at Columbia Heights Educational Campus (CHEC) in Washington, DC. I'm talking about how excited I am to work hard, and how much I respect my school's commitment to excellence. And then here's me again in January of 2010, right after I quit.

Example 2: Here is me in September of 2009, wondering about teacher turnover at CHEC, and resolving to work harder in the name of ensuring all students' success. And here is me in January of 2010, frustrated by Amanda Ripley's piece on "good teaching" in The Atlantic.

Example 3: Here is me detailing the amount of time and energy I spent in a day on tasks unrelated to teaching and learning. And here is me, in the same month, detailing the amount of time I'd put into a unit plan with lukewarm results.

Example 4: Here is me realizing how completely messed up our educational leadership is. And here is me ready to vomit over the way we create and use data in schools. It's become difficult to keep up my idealism in the face of harmful leadership decisions.

Example 5: Finally, here is me writing about how work-related stress impacted my health by leading to the discovery of a brain cyst, and resolving to treat myself better. I am a teacher, not a martyr.

And there you have it - a pretty decent paper trail detailing a transformation that took place over years. I wish I'd begun blogging during my teaching internship. I can hardly imagine how committed and energetic that thinking would have read.

Over the years, I've reached burnout numerous times and pulled in the reins, just enough to keep myself doing this work, because it is important work. Deep down, I am still furiously committed to equity, and I am still deeply frustrated with the systems our society imposes on the less fortunate.

However, with the vastly greater amount of knowledge regarding our public education system and the reasons it exists as it does, I am more sensible in the way I manage my time and commitment.

Is that just the jaded man's way of saying he's jaded?

Whatever It Takes

2012-05-06T15:52:00.001-04:00

"Are you willing to do whatever it takes to ensure each child succeeds?"

Recently, Highline School District (the district I work in, just south of Seattle) conducted something of an audit around their devotion to equity. The question above was among many considered by the "auditors" in determining the commitment of the district's staff to equity.

That this question was considered by such a group strongly implies that equity is only served when school personnel answer yes. Six years ago, when I was just beginning my journey into teaching, I probably would not have found anything disagreeable with that notion. Today, I find it repugnant.

In the 2009-2010 school year, my school's on-time graduation rate was just over fifty percent. The overall rate was just over sixty percent (adding the students who graduated in five or six years). On Thursday, I began discussing a few of the causes of the vastly inferior quality of education often offered in low-income urban schools in comparison to their wealthier suburban counterparts.

If every staff member in a school like mine truly attempted to do whatever it took to make sure each child found academic success; time for sleep, food, adult relationships, families, and exercise would disappear.

While school districts obviously have a large role to play in the education of a child, we have to stop viewing them as the only entities who bear responsibility for a student's academic success.

As things stand, I am decidedly unwilling to attempt to do everything within my power to ensure every child's success. That would be a Herculean effort doomed to failure. It would also require an astronomical degree of egotism on my part.

If things were different.... If I could first pose a few of my own questions, like...

1) Are we, the taxpayers, willing to pay for the education of other people's children, even when they don't look or think like we do, and even (and especially) when they don't live close to us? And are we willing to not only pay for, but work to fix problems that we think aren't our fault?

2) Do we, as a society, recognize the ills that come with societal inequality? And are we, as a society, willing to bear responsibility for that inequality and seek to rectify it?

3) Do we acknowledge that an individual's potential for success in academics, and in life, depends on far more than their proficiency in the traditional academic curriculum? And are we willing to act accordingly?

4) Do we believe in acting on our democratic values rather than just spouting them when the moment arises?

Perhaps if the answers to all of my questions were a yes, then my willingness to answer yes to the question society apparently poses to me, the teacher, would be more realistic and less egotistical.

But the way things are, I will not save every child. In fact, it's unlikely I'll save even one of them. I will, however, help as much as I can without losing my health or my sanity. (I know what happens when you try that.) It's unfortunate that in some districts, my attitude would likely cost a teacher his or her job, which causes many of those unfortunate souls to pretend. To keep their jobs, those teachers talk the talk, hiding that the real walk would be done with a sack of anvils tied around their neck.

I suppose we can pretend as long as it suits us. I'm just worried that we don't all understand that that's exactly what we're doing.

When It Rains, It Pours

2012-05-03T23:13:00.000-04:00

Having gone to school in a middle-class community, and having been placed in classes with similarly-motivated peers, my first year teaching in a low-income school caught me off-guard in lots of ways. That only three or four of my students would do the homework I assigned; that the consequences I assigned for coming late were generally greeted with apathy; that I only met three parents on open-house night....all of those things astonished me.

I think we generally blow over the vast differences that exist between schools in our national education debate. As many erudite observers have noted, the problem with education in the United States is NOT that we don't know how to do it; the problem is that we're unwilling to do it for everyone. Public education is still catastrophically inequitable.

On a daily basis, I am reminded of the myriad ways the students I teach are disadvantaged. I am, however, far less often cognizant of the widespread public ignorance regarding schools like mine and the challenges they face.

Students coming from low-income urban communities generally receive a vastly inferior quality of education for so many reasons. I thought it'd be useful to try to explain five of them.....for now.

1) Students from low-income communities often come from families who value very different kinds of knowledge than our culture's traditional public school curriculum. While there exist vast stores of knowledge in these communities, that knowledge is usually very different than what's being taught in school. While students of affluent background's are taught to value the content more traditionally taught in our mainstream curriculum prior to entering school (and outside of school on family visits to museums or foreign countries), poor students of color are sometimes faced with learning material in school for which there is no support at home.

2) Diversity is a great thing, but not if you don't know how to handle it. Urban classrooms contain students who are different in lots of different ways, many more ways than is usually the case in suburban communities. While I would argue that there are great benefits to being educated in such an environment, they are often not measured in traditional assessment of a student's learning, and therefore, pose more often a barrier, particularly when differentiation is done poorly, cultures clash, and students are tracked.

3) Low-income schools experience drastic changes every year. This is especially true in the wake of NCLB, when every district is trying something new all the time in the hope of raising test scores. However, real solutions take real time to work. And changes in staff, curriculum, instruction, and school leadership are more harmful than helpful when they happen so regularly. Few people outside of schools understand exactly how destructive these changes are.

4) The teacher turnover rate in underprivileged communities is particularly sad. "Survive five," they tell you in grad school. Five years being the point at which over fifty percent of teachers in these schools leave. Good teaching, particularly in schools in which students don't know how to learn or behave appropriately to facilitate learning, takes lots of time, effort, and consistency. Unfortunately, many people in the educational debate today argue that new teachers are often more energetic, and that this phenomenon is, in fact, not all that harmful (and perhaps even beneficial). The VAST majority of these people, however, have very little experience in schools and generally aim to promote a misguided ideology that does not align well with reality.

5) Students in urban schools come from families who speak languages other than English FAR MORE OFTEN than those in suburban schools. Many teacher training programs do a poor job of preparing new teachers well for English language learners. And imagine being new to a school where most of your teachers neither speak your language nor know how to help you. It's hard to think of a challenge that requires more intellectual and emotional perseverance for a child.

These are merely five ways students of low-income urban communities face a much greater challenge than their peers in suburban communities. I will write about more of them, and more of what I perceive to be the public's misconceptions about these schools when I have more time under the label, "Urban Schools."

What Do You Do?

2012-04-23T23:06:00.001-04:00

Including myself, there are three freshman language arts teachers at my school. Among us, there are five sections of ninth-grade language arts, four of which have around fifteen students. I have the one section that has twenty-six students.

All three of us are extremely concerned about the freshman at our school, and none of us really know what to do with what we perceive to be a dire emergency.

How do I describe it?

The freshman class (of about 116) seems to have collectively established a culture of apathy. They will do their work, but at a snail's pace. Attempting to collect major assignments is excruciating, mostly because of the anticipation that fewer than half of them will have anything remotely resembling a final project by the time it is due.

In classes larger than fifteen (e.g. my twenty-six student class), chaos reigns. I never thought twenty-six students was a large class size until this year. It feels like I'm trying to get the attention of fifty or more people. And, in that class, my primary concern is management. When contrasted with my other language arts class, my twenty-six student group makes my fifteen-student group look like angels. But it's pointed out to me by the other language arts teachers that the students in the smaller classes aren't exactly achieving at a stellar level.

As one of the other language arts teachers put it to me the other day, "If you didn't know anything about authentic learning and you walked into my class, you would probably think things were going swell. But from my perspective, this is a disaster."

She was referring to the pace at which students work and the completely apathetic (although often respectful) way they approach academics. They have learned how to fake learning, and they've developed successful habits for keeping task-minded teachers away from them, but they're a great distance from authentic learning and thinking.

Today, a colleague and I arranged for her seniors to observe my twenty-six student class. They observed "students staring at the wall," "students ignoring instructions," "off-task behavior," "inappropriate language," and "students walking in and out of class without permission." The seniors were equally as concerned as the teachers about the freshman behavior.

Part of the problem with our ninth-grade class likely has to do with the enormous changes they've endured this year. One of our math teachers left about two months into the school year. Students in her class dealt with subs for about a month, and many were then moved under the care of a different math teacher. One of our language arts teacher left for maternity leave about a month later, and there is now a long-term sub teaching her students. At the end of the first semester, it was decided that schedule changes were necessary in order to decrease class sizes for the ninth-grade students. As a result, many ninth-graders again had their language arts teachers changed, and some had their science teachers changed. The grade that demanded the least schedule disruption received the most (as is often the case).

With about seven weeks left in the school year, the question is what do we do? There is grave concern that these students will leave the ninth-grade woefully unprepared for tenth-grade and a college-readiness path. They also seem to have hardened in some already dreadfully harmful anti-learning habits that allow them to navigate their school day without thinking or real work. The teachers see the problem, the administration sees it, the seniors see it, but the ninth-graders are largely unaware. And those ninth-graders who are concerned are unwilling to voice their opinions to their peers for fear of social reprisal.

What to do, what to do?

A Teacher's Role

2012-03-30T18:22:00.000-04:00

An education is made up of much more than time spent in school. The understanding one gains of the world and how to interact with it is shaped (in small or large part) by nearly every experience an individual has. The classroom is merely one place we're deliberate about creating experiences designed to enhance understanding deemed necessary to participate in society. Unfortunately school is often the place where learning is most inauthentic, and subsequently boring. This is partly because the learning can often seem forced, but also because the classroom operates in a system that has a tendency to strangle individuality.

Two weeks ago during my staff's professional collaboration time, our principal asked the literacy team to consider an article in an ASCD publication regarding student similarities and differences. While I can't remember the title or author, I do remember the pages were laden with pictures of butterflies. The images were meant to remind the reader of the uniqueness of each student. The argument of the article, however, went something like this:

Students are all the same in some ways
Students are all different in other ways
Research suggests that constructing instruction around student similarities is more effective than structuring it around their differences

While I certainly appreciate the benefit of strategies that build on student similarities, I think we have to be careful about reading too far into the research here.

The industrial model of public education that imagines schools as learning factories we currently work under does not blend well with an understanding of students as unique learners. As a result, educators teaching in the industrial school system have long grappled with finding ways to reconcile the system's demand that students be treated the same with the learner's demand that s/he be treated uniquely.

Assigning grades, class size, rows of desks, classes that last the same amount of time every day, and denying students the right to eat in class are all policies designed with the system in mind. And while one may argue that some of these things are important for students to learn in life, it is primarily true as a means of preparation for future systems.

It only recently struck me that perhaps the indicator of quality teaching is the ability to negotiate this conflict between system and student in the interest of the student.

Students are different in myriad ways: language acquisition, gender, interests, relationship with parents/authority, race and culture, cognitive ability, emotional maturity, social inclination, etcetera. The more ways students are different, the longer it takes a beginning teacher to find systematic (i.e. practical) ways of appreciating those differences. And this, I would contend, is one of the many reasons it is so challenging to teach in urban schools: their students are often different in more ways than students in other kinds of schools. (Of course, it also provides grand educational opportunity.)

The best teachers, given an industrial system and increasingly post-industrial thinkers, are those who find ways to stretch the system to its breaking point (and sometimes beyond) in an effort to appreciate the learner's uniqueness.

Examples:

Twenty-five different students in one classroom working on twenty-five different assignments
Assessment that appreciates a learner's starting point but still expects advancement in line with others
Grades being assigned with more and more comments as to the student's strengths and areas for growth
Creating teams of teachers who have the same core group of students so collaboration can focus on meeting individual needs

And so I have come to understand the master teacher as the broker of authentic learning experiences (both unique and shared) who is simultaneously hounded by the sometimes damaging demands of an overbearing system. S/he must make decisions about when to allow the system to have its way and when to invest energy looking for ways to circumvent it. While the expert may stretch the system just beyond its breaking point, the system nonetheless imposes a limit beyond which even the best cannot pass.

I wonder: What does the teacher's role look like beyond the industrial model of schooling? How do we push forward so that learners gain necessary skills and knowledge without the uninspired weight of the system that keeps many from thriving? Importantly, how do we answer these questions in the name of society generally, and not solely in service of a particular class or special interest?

On Coercion, the Healthcare Law, and Race to the Top

2012-03-29T23:58:00.000-04:00

Listening to the third day of oral arguments before the Supreme Court over the Obama healthcare law today, I was struck by the discussion around whether the law constitutes coercion.

The law suggests the federal government would be within its right to deny medicaid funds long received to states who refuse to accept new funds to cover more of their citizens. The argument on the side of the twenty-six states resisting the law is that this is coercive (and therefore unconstitutional) because it does not allow them to realistically opt out of participation. States have become so dependent on this federal money that not receiving it would be tantamount to being fiscally incapacitated.

Interesting, I thought.

In discussion with Solicitor General Verrilli, Justice Alito (who certainly sees the law as unconstitutional) brought up the possibility of a similar situation in education.

"Let's say Congress says this to the States: We have got great news for you; we know your expenditures on education are a huge financial burden, so we are going to take that completely off your shoulders; we are going to impose a special Federal education tax which will raise exactly the same amount of money as all of the States now spend on education; and then we are going to give you a grant that is equal to what you spent on education last year.

Now, this is a great offer and we think you will take it, but of course, if you take it, it's going to have some conditions because we are going to set rules on teacher tenure, on collective bargaining, on curriculum, on textbooks, class size, school calendar and many other things. So take it or leave it."

I was pleased Alito brought this up, because I'd been thinking about Race to the Top for about five minutes before Alito made reference to it (sort of). Made me feel like maybe I could become a Supreme Court justice one day (you don't have to have a law degree, you know - seriously).

Alito's point, of course, was that this would be coercive, and unconstitutional. Race to the Top was not quite as dramatic as Alito's scenario (nor was it a law passed by Congress). The Department of Education did not offer to pay for all of states' educational expenditures. But given the doomsday scenario facing states as a result of the foolish requirements imposed by NCLB and the dire financial status of many very poor districts in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, it is easy to see how difficult it might have been for states to pass up the opportunity to provide more federal funds to their districts. What decent person wouldn't at least be tempted by the offer, even when unsavory requirements come attached?

As much of the media now predicts (and I'm tempted to agree) that the healthcare law will be declared unconstitutional within a few months, I'm curious as to how the justices would treat RTTT were it before the court? I wonder, since, as Justice Kennedy rightly noted, most questions in life are questions of degree, how much leverage the federal government must employ before it's considered coercive? And how much more of that coercion is our system willing to tolerate when it benefits corporate interests rather than the citizenry?

Teaching Humanity

2012-03-24T17:36:00.001-04:00

This is the first year of my career I've been tasked with teaching literacy directly. I have two groups of 9th-grade students whose literacy I'm responsible for improving in a detectable way.

Prior to this year, I'd never really thought about literacy all that deeply. Literacy - the ability to read, right? As someone trained in language arts, I know how to engage students with reading: engage and build background knowledge, make predictions, employ guiding questions, provide high-interest materials, reflect on and discuss reading after it's been done.

But I've never been formally trained in how to teach students to read - i.e. the processes around transforming words and syntax into meaning. The notion of fluency, while I've been passively familiar with it, has never played an important role in my thinking about language arts instruction. These skills have traditionally been relegated to the domain of the elementary teacher.

It seems, though, that this year my ignorance of literacy instruction must die a thorough death. And the further I wade into this pedagogical pool, the more passionate I become about fully inducing rigor mortis - because, the more I pay close attention to my students' reading habits, the more (and, just as often, less) I understand what's happening in their heads when they look at the words on a page.

Paulo Friere insisted that reading the word is dependent on reading the world. The more literate the world becomes, the more the opposite must also be true.

In August of 2010, NPR ran a series (The Human Edge) on what makes us human. One story, entitled "When Did We Become Mentally Modern?", argues that the defining characteristic of modern humanity is our capacity for symbolic thought, which holds civilization together. It was upon listening to this story that both the broad nature of literacy and its grand importance really came together for me.

Without going too far into the nuances of literacy, I'd like to share the realization I've come to in the last year. Literacy, broadly defined, is the capacity to appropriately interpret a symbol or collection of symbols in a given context.

Literate individuals approach a new experience (e.g. book, movie, lecture, interaction with authority) with a series of prior experiences that appropriately informs their understanding of the symbols used in that new experience.

No longer do I think of teaching literacy as teaching students to read. It is a much more daunting task than merely helping students make sense of words on a page. In some ways, it allows literacy to be understood as being supported in every classroom in its various forms: arithmetic literacy, scientific literacy, political literacy. While this may be off-putting for those who'd like a more unique role for the concept, I find it both empowering and eye-opening. For me, this understanding has empowered me to breathlessly articulate a new-found respect for the importance of reading. But more importantly, it has built a mental bridge between my understanding of reading and my understanding of education's purpose.

If education's purpose is to empower students to interact purposefully and positively with their world, then literacy (as I've broadly defined it) must be at its heart. In essence, a major purpose of education becomes building enough background knowledge and experiences around the immense number of symbols we encounter on a daily basis (imagine how much meaning you miss due to lack of familiarity with symbols) so that the student may make sense of an otherwise more bland world. In doing so, the student develops a major part of what makes them human.

Somebody's Unplugging My Computer

2012-03-10T18:21:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, for the third day in a row, I sat down at my computer during third period to find somebody had pulled its plug out of the socket.

The first two days it happened, I chalked it up to an accident. The outlet is in sort of an awkward place, and it's possible that a student may have bumped into the cord or moved a chair into it to knock it out of place.

Noticing this problem, on Thursday I rearranged my desk so that the outlet would be completely covered with no possibility of students accidentally knocking the cord out of the outlet. But when I sat down to my computer on Friday, I found that it had happened again.

I cannot express in words how frustrating this is. If I had a pillow in the classroom, I may have made a display of punching it a bunch of times to show students how angry I was about the situation.

When my computer is turned off, I lose my attendance, it takes me at least three minutes to boot it back up - which is incredibly annoying when I need to find something quick to help a student with - and there's a possibility that documents I'd been working on are lost. And let's not forget possible damage to the computer.

Rather than punch a pillow. I stared at the wall for about three minutes taking deep breaths. What should I do about this?

My gut reaction is to yell at students. I interpret this behavior as malicious. If it is, though, yelling is probably the worst thing I could do since it's probably what the guilty party is hoping for - some evidence that my emotions have been triggered.

After calming down, I began to think about whether a student might fully understand how I interpret this behavior. I suppose there's a possibility that whoever is doing this might think it's just a little game. It wouldn't be the first time I've had a student do something incredibly obnoxious and consider it playful. Freshman aren't exactly experts at considering how their behaviors affect others.

So - how do I address this issue if my goals are a) for this to stop happening, and b) for the offending student to be more conscientious of the way their behaviors affect others. This definitely has the potential to be a learning opportunity. And it certainly hasn't been the first time this year I've had to deal with something like this.

I figure there are two ways of going about this:

1) I could not say anything to students and try to catch the offender in the act. I could then write a referral on the student and let the principal deal with him or her.

or

2) I could talk about this issue with the whole class. I could explain how this behavior is affecting me and how I interpret it. I could let students know that if this action is happening as a result of resentment toward me, then I would prefer a face-to-face discussion about why and how I'm causing that resentment so we can stop it. I could explain how stopping me from doing my work hurts other students who need help in class. I could then ask students to "police" themselves, which might (hopefully) lead to concerned students confronting the student who's doing this and pressuring him or her to stop.

I think option two will be my approach.

It's often frustrating that I have to spend serious time thinking about how to handle issues like this. I sometimes think my time would be better used in conferences with students, thinking about curriculum, or planning with colleagues. On the other hand, maybe handling these concerns the right way is just as important a part of students' education as the explicit curriculum. And, hopefully, the sense of community that is preserved by avoiding the yelling and pillow punching will serve to cultivate a more positive and effective learning environment in the future.

What do you think? What should I do?

Grading Demystified

2012-03-06T23:03:00.001-05:00

What's a point worth? How about a percentage?

Amira has a 95% in language arts and a 93% in math. She must be better at language, right?

I spent the first four years of my career as a teacher (plus my practicum year) trying to make sense out of our antiquated system for assigning students a worthless litany of numbers and declaring them to be valid indicators of their learning.

I would, on occasion, agonize over whether to award a student a point (or four points - or nine points - or two points...) for an answer on a test, or a paragraph in an essay. (Essays: what an idiotic thing to assign points to!) I would have internal debates over the legitimacy of my practice and whether it was useful for students.

As far as I can tell, there are three purposes for grades: 1) external motivation, 2) to assign students a rank/mark to help colleges and other organizations make decisions about whether to admit a given student, and 3) to provide students and parents feedback about a student's performance.

As much as we may hate to admit it, a student's learning cannot be easily quantified, particularly the most valuable kind of learning. Acceptance of this essential reality forced me to finally abandon the search for a meaningful system for assigning students numbers. In its place, and with the help of some phenomenal educators, I've come to be an ardent proponent of outcomes-based assessment.

Outcomes-based assessment satisfies the only meaningful (as far as I'm concerned) purpose of grades: to provide feedback on a student's performance. And it does it in a much more effective way than do mere numbers and letters.

Although many outcomes-based teachers are forced, in the end, to assign a student a grade (A, B, C...) because of our college system, no grades would be used in outcomes-based fantasy land.

So how does it work? It goes something like this:

1) Identify, in writing, what skills or knowledge you want a student to gain as a result of their time in class. For example: "Explain the causes of the rapid increase in globalization of the 16th century" - an outcome I'm currently using in my world history class.

2) Determine what a student would do in order to demonstrate high proficiency in the outcome. For example: "Speaks or writes confidently about at least five different causes of the rapid increase in globalization of the 16th century. Provides sound connections among the various causes. Makes no mistakes in historical accuracy."

3) Determine what a student would do in order to merely demonstrate proficiency in the outcome. For example: "Speaks or writes confidently about at least three different causes of the rapid increase in globalization of the 16th century. Makes only one or two minor mistakes in historical accuracy."

4) Then - and here's the beauty of the whole outcomes-based grading system - decide whether the evidence students provide you (i.e. the assignment they turn in - created either by the teacher or by the student) suggests the student is highly proficient, proficient, or not yet proficient. No points, no averaging, no percentages. Just your judgement, but based on relatively fair and previously communicated expectations.

A few more things that make this system extraordinarily superior to arbitrary points? If the teacher is organized enough to define his or her outcomes and indicators before beginning a unit, students have authentic opportunities to self-assess and peer-assess. They will, as a result, have a stronger feel for what they're supposed to be learning AND be empowered to have real conversations with the teacher about both his or her instruction and assessment of their learning.

No more points. No more pretending to be objective. No more averaging or handing out false percentages. No more extra-credit grubbing.

Lastly, and by no means least, outcomes-based grading is the foundation of meaningful differentiation. The teacher who plans his or her class by planning activities first and assessments second will be hard-pressed to create an alternative set of activities or assignments for students who struggle to engage (often because the activities' purpose is not completely clear in the mind of the teacher). However, the teacher who plans outcomes and assessments first and activities later will find: 1) by teaching students to use outcomes masterfully, students will differentiate for themselves - especially when students feel comfortable learning from each other, and 2) it's easier to come up with alternative activities when their purpose is crystal clear.

It took me a few years to figure this all out, but I got it. Just another one of those powerful pedagogical competencies that should remind us of the importance of teaching experience.

New York City: The Ultimate PD

2012-02-26T00:50:00.000-05:00

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City and has been cross-posted at GothamSchools. You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

Nobody would accuse Scott of being an ineffective teacher. He has a clean-shaven head and well-pressed dress shirt and tie. His calm demeanor and busy students make it seem like he effortlessly expands minds on a daily basis. It was my great pleasure to meet this particular teacher and his particularly high-functioning classroom on a visit to Brooklyn International High School in October of 2010.

Teaching in a school devoted to serving the needs of English language learners from across the world, Scott taught in a way that might have seemed unconventional. Learners accustomed to understanding teachers as providers of knowledge might have been caused discomfort at first.

On the day I walked into Scott's classroom, every one of his social studies students was engaged - challenge enough in an environment where students' needs are so diverse. What I was most impressed by, though, was that no more than three students were working on the same task.

As I made my way through the room looking at students' work and asking questions, I was amazed to see students creating posters, writing essays, having academic conversations, or tutoring others; all as a means of demonstrating learning of the same material. In the middle of the room Scott stood taking notes as one student after another stepped up to defend the learning he or she had accomplished in the unit the class was concluding.

To the layman, it may have appeared as if Scott had merely been blessed with a batch of phenomenal students. To the aspiring expert teacher, the distinguished skill and dedication necessary to create this kind of classroom learning space, done during, but more often outside of class time (e.g. curriculum planning, parent conferences, diagnostic assessments, relationship building, classroom culture and routines development, professional development around effective strategies for English language learners in the social studies content area), was inspiring.

I left Brooklyn International so excited that the next day I spent nearly fifteen minutes relating my observations with colleagues at my school in the Bronx. We decided that on the teacher effectiveness rubric being used to assess us, a rating entitled "Scott" should be available beyond "distinguished."

I tell this story because it so nicely encapsulates one of the things about working in New York that so vividly stands out in my memory: the opportunity to improve with the best.

I offer my assistant principal as another example.

The first time I met Liz, she grilled me not on how many years I'd been teaching or the kind of personality I had in the classroom or my favorite instructional strategies, but the last book I read. We had a lengthy conversation about the purpose of social studies education and how that purpose varied depending on the school environment and students.

Liz and our principal set aside money for professional development and time for teacher collaboration in a way I'd never seen in any other school I'd worked in. She stepped in my class at least a few times a month, not to evaluate or suggest changes in my style, but to listen to the students learn and co-teach from time to time. During this time, she taught me to teach students who'd only been speaking English for a few years how to make meaning out of parts of a complex text like Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith - a feat I'd found challenging with native English speakers.

A few other things I learned from Liz? Great writing is about great thinking. School is an apprenticeship in learning; students should be learning primarily how to learn. Teach content just slightly above the class's most advanced learner, create structures for the learning to trickle down, and you will have an effective means of differentiation.

I taught for four years before moving to New York, often feeling like I was coming up short finding useful ways of improving my practice. My experiences in New York advanced my teaching quickly, and I found myself on a whole new level, exploring new pedagogical subtleties I hadn't previously been aware of.

While everyone in the City may not be lucky enough to have such a competent administrator or visit the classroom of a truly master teacher, New York, as it does with many professions, offers teachers the opportunity to work with many on the field's forefront. Take the time to work with these professionals, and New York City is the ultimate professional development experience.

Education in Light of Poverty

2012-02-23T00:28:00.000-05:00

From Michael Marder, whose thinking and data you can also see more of here.

The Struggles of a Small School

2012-02-01T23:55:00.000-05:00

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City. This post is an edited version of two posts I wrote while in New York: "Could You Make My Job More Difficult" and "If Only We Had Fewer Resources." You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

"I work in a small school." It's what I told myself every time I found myself stealing staples from office staplers or drawing Venn diagrams on twenty papers before class because all of the copiers were broken at my small school in the Bronx. It was sort of like, "This is why I moved to New York," which is what I said every time I talked education with a bunch of progressive educators, got tickets to see Diane Ravitch speak, visited authors' apartments for book clubs, or watched people live their lives in the Manhattan skyline at two in the morning. But one was positive, and the other often proved a hassle.

In the past few decades, much has been made of the benefits of small schools. However, new schools that need new systems and cultures are enormous struggles for those who chose to work in them. These struggles come in many forms, are compounded when said schools share decaying facilities with other schools, and are nearly never written about. While I've felt that incredible amounts of meaningful work have often been sabotaged (intentionally and unintentionally) at every level of education in every district I've worked in. Never did I feel as much frustration as when I worked in New York City. Many tasks (mostly those tasks completely unrelated to instruction) required throughout a teacher's days seemed to take far too much time as a result of emerging systems and political ineptitude. Moreover, in New York I often felt teachers were regularly put in precarious legal situations that would make any sane person reconsider their job on a daily basis. Here are a few examples from my daily experiences while teaching at a third-year international school in the Bronx, which (I should note) I thought had incredibly dedicated and capable administrators.

1. Getting paid was a job in itself.

For the first time in my career, I had to clock in and out of school for 'per session' pay - i.e. money I was paid for taking on additional work at school beyond my regular teaching duties. At the end of the pay period, I had to take my pay stub, fill out a form, get administration to sign off, and hand it to the secretary. What should have been a simple task often turned into a cat-and-mouse game. Busy administrators were often hard to find for a signature, and the secretary regularly left school soon after my last class was over. Also, I had to make copies of the time card, which would be no problem if our copiers weren't regularly broken or being used by someone else. This process often took at least twenty minutes of my day.

2. Going to the bathroom was a hassle.

Student bathrooms were locked to prevent students from hanging out and smoking (or whatever else you might do as a sixteen-year-old in the bathroom between classes). When students wanted to go to the bathroom, they first had to get a key from the main office. The key was unfortunately often stolen. It was not rare for students to leave my room for twenty minutes to go to the bathroom only to come back and tell me they went to three different people in two different offices, and nobody had a key. Students were sometimes told by office staff that teachers had the key; teachers could open the bathroom for them. That would have been fine if it wasn't an enormous liability for me to leave the rest of the class unattended during the school day. I could lend them my keys, but that would have also been an enormous liability. A better functioning system might have been in place if every teacher and administrator wasn't utterly consumed with dealing with other more important parts of birthing a decent small school.

My basement bathroom

Then there was the matter of the faculty bathroom. The only easily accessible bathrooms were on the first and second floor, but they were student bathrooms. It was, of course, another liability for teachers to use them. Teachers were instructed to use the teacher bathroom on the other side of the building in the basement. This turned out to be quite the Double Dare challenge during the three-minute break we had to change classes (during which time we also had to move materials and cart textbooks from room to room, sometimes on different floors, which required waiting for the elevator). Many teachers risked the liability.

3. Keeping classrooms clean and kids supervised was overwhelming.

Really? Pancake on the floor?

Teachers traveled from room to room at my school because we didn't have enough classrooms for any one of them to ever be empty. In a rush to make it from one class to another, teachers forgot to do a lot of things - e.g. worksheets, to make sure kids cleaned the inevitable mess they made on a daily basis, or to lock the door. As a result, classrooms often looked awful by the end of the day. I usually spent thirty minutes cleaning this up before I could ever start any work after school.

My class after four teachers

Students were not allowed to be in rooms by themselves. If anything happened, teachers were told they might be held responsible. That seemed unfair because there were non-teachers who used our classrooms. If I locked my door before lunch to keep kids out, I would inevitably be called away from a meeting later in the day to let the Bronx Arts instructors in. Bronx Arts instructors were people our school hired to teach arts classes after lunch on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and because those people weren't on staff, they often didn't know to lock the door when they left. Even if they had, they didn't have a key to do so.

Teachers were also responsible for keeping windows closed. Electronics and/or weapons might come through them, since they couldn't come through the metal detectors in the morning.

4. Our building was falling apart.

The ceiling in our principal's office leaked water for weeks. Plastic covered the leak for a time. The office did not get heat like the rest of the building, and on one occasion, a portion of the ceiling fell on our principal while writing an email.

In the classroom, teaching could be a hassle when the building pipes made it sound like you were living in a popcorn bag on steroids. I, and other teachers, often yelled at students, not because students were being disruptive, but because the banging coming from the pipes required it.

And then there was the heat. On the first and second floors, it was often outrageously hot. Some kids opened the windows to the freezing air outside, and other kids yelled at them for it. Conflict ensued. Teaching became harder.

5. The students' diets were abysmal.

I often wondered if teaching students about the Industrial Revolution was worth my time at all when their brains were made out of Pringles. Many students across the country do not seem to understand, at all, the importance of healthy eating. They're not even aware they're eating poorly. A number of students argued with me over the quality of fast food. "Mister - fast food makes you strong! It's good for you!" I would sigh and try to explain, but that lesson takes longer than a short conversation.

The lunch students received on the SIXTH floor (which meant five or six flights they had to walk up after class) didn't seem to inspire healthy eating either. Many of my students who were already going hungry at home avoided eating lunch at school because it had such a bad reputation. I kept bananas, almonds, and raisins in class to feed my students when they couldn't work because they were so hungry - I still do. This, of course, takes time away from learning.

6. Technology mostly made my life more difficult.

Our school had limited technology until about April. We had a laptop cart and five projectors (for twenty-five teachers), but when my AP asked me once why nobody was making use of the technology, I rolled my eyes and went into a fifteen-minute monologue about how technology made my life more difficult. If I wanted to check the laptop cart out, I had to get it in the morning and push it to the room I was using that day. I had to worry about losing laptops and being liable. I had to somehow ensure a decent lesson despite many of the students' desire to do anything but work once a computer was in front of them. Finally, I had to figure out how to cart it from class to class for the rest of the day (or at least until I had a planning period) even if I don't want to use it with other classes. The same goes for the projectors, which are pretty hard to use when you don't have any white wall space in your rooms.

Then there was the matter of the teacher computers. The only computers teachers could use were located in a tiny teacher room on the second floor (there were about six working computers for twenty-five teachers). The door didn't lock and it was a hassle to keep students out when teachers weren't using it. The computers had viruses that destroyed more than one of my colleagues work.

7. Tardiness was something of an issue.

We had a big problem with tardiness. Students were only given three minutes to get to class (this is the only way we could figure a legal way to provide the necessary amount of yearly instructional time). Few of of our students (all of them foreigners) were familiar with the concept of bells and tardiness. Many did not understand that being in the hall when the bell rang meant being late. Furthermore, with seven schools in the building, we a lot of bells ring throughout the day. They sometimes seemed pretty meaningless. Depending on what floor you were on, you might have also heard fire alarms going off without purpose or bells that lasted thirty seconds to a minute in length. This all gave students a pretty easy excuse for being tardy.

I found that when we tried to address tardiness, we didn't really have the resources to provide students with consequences. Lunch detentions and tardy sweeps had to be done by teachers willing to give up their lunches and planning periods, as the administration was busy doing observations and having conferences with Gates Foundation reps, DOE reps, and the amazing load of other work they have to take care of. I gave up my planning period and lunch every day for a few weeks doing tardy sweeps and lunch detentions. I decided they weren't worth my sanity. We didn't have money for a dean to do this kind of thing, and I think my AP was right in spending that money on more teachers rather than more administrators.

Small schools are not automatically excellent.

I think small schools are better for serving low-income communities. But they are neither for the faint-hearted nor mildly committed. My experience suggests they are only for the greatest of educational problem solvers, the most fiercely determined.

Classroom Management 500: Master's Thesis

2012-01-26T23:38:00.003-05:00

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City and was respoted at GothamSchools. You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

Classroom management is usually at the top of the new teacher's list of concerns. Excellent classroom management often takes years to master, and the only way to get there is through experience, largely because it's nuanced. The things that disrupt your instruction in one classroom aren't always the things that will disrupt it in another. Sometimes it's the students' attitudes; sometimes it's a poorly planned lesson; sometimes it's a fire drill; and sometimes it's a pigeon flying around your classroom, pooping on desks.

It was a day in late March, and I had planned a lesson to prepare my students for the Regents exam in US and Global History. The lesson involved a simple strategy for teaching students to find success on the document-based question (DBQ) essay. With pressure to prepare students for the exams increasing, I accepted teaching test-prep lesson, but my heart wasn't entirely in it. This would not be a "Stand and Deliver" lesson.

I arrived to school sweaty and frustrated after having stood for over an hour on two trains and a bus to get to the school in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx from my apartment in Washington Heights. After passing students waiting in line to go through the metal detector, I turned the corner of the building and was blasted by a wave of hot air upon opening the door. I immediately took off my backpack, jacket, and hat.

"Why do they keep running the heat when it's warm outside," I had once asked.

"The budget for next year's heat is based on the amount of fuel used this year," another teacher had told me. Of course.

After gathering attendance and making copies, I pushed through the heaviest door in the building to enter the first of four classrooms I would teach in that day. This one was on the second floor and had a massive radiator lining the wall opposite the door and beneath the windows. Although the door to the room was heavy, the hydraulics in the door closing mechanism created an extraordinarily slow swing speed until the last two feet, at which point the door would slam shut like a Venus Flytrap for slow-moving students. In addition to nipping any student taking their time on the way out, it also created a powerful gust of air that would consistently blow one of my student's hair into the face of the student next to her.

"Come on!" Enrique would say as he brushed Cynthia's hair out of his eyes.

On this particular day, I walked in a few minutes early to what seemed like something of a commotion on the far side of the room near the window. After I told my students (100% native Spanish speakers) about our activity for the day, I noticed Rosie in the back with a smile on her face like she had a plan. As I went back and forth between facing the board and the class explaining the DBQ activity, I noticed giggling around Rosie.

"Mister. Can we open the window?" asked Rosie. "¡Hace calor!"

She wasn't wrong. The room was hot. It was temperate outside and the heaters were going full blast, often making a sound akin to a workman pounding on the side of an aluminum room with an over-sized hammer. But there was something about the beginning of class and the way she said it that made me think she had more at stake in opening the window than just cooling down.

The school aide opened the door to grab the attendance.

"COME ON!" said Enrique as he had to refocus.

"No Rosie," using my teacher instinct. "I think we'll be okay."

I returned to my instruction on the DBQ strategy when the assistant principal opened the door to tell me I was needed in the office as the school's chapter leader. Janet, another social studies teacher, would be covering for me.

I walked out of the room for what would be fifteen minutes discussing a contract issue.

"PPPHHHHHFFFffffttttt!" Enrique made a scene as we left. I imagined a minor skirmish ensuing.

When I returned to the classroom, Janet gave me a sideways smile. The door closed and Enrique thew his paper and pencil over his shoulder in frustration.

"We have a visitor," said Janet, pointing at the ceiling.

I looked up and saw a pigeon perched on pipes near the ceiling. Beneath it was an empty table with bird droppings on it. The five students who had previously been at the table were now clumped with five other students at a table on the other side of the room laughing and pointing at the pigeon.

I looked at Rosie and knew exactly what had happened.

Janet offered a sincere apology, wished me good luck, and walked back out into the hallway. This time Enrique ducked and came back up with a smile.

Preferring to teach and worry about the pigeon after class, I calmed the class down and convinced them they could still learn even with the banging, the heat, the hair in Enrique's face, the pigeon, the giggling with Rosie, and a frustrated and exahausted teacher who wasn't confident in the utility of teaching students to pass a state test. I yelled the rest of my instruction across the room over the noise of the heater. On the plus side, the window was open, so I wasn't sweating as profusely.

Students strained to hear me during instruction, and wore looks of agony and frustration as we moved into the work period. They complained of being unable to concentrate. But many worked hard to write something down in their second language with the banging, the heat, the hair, the pigeon, the giggling, and the frustrated and exhausted teacher.

When the bell rang, I collected their papers and stuffed them into my backpack in a hurry to get to my next classroom.

By the end of the day, the pigeon had escaped unharmed. The students, I'm not so sure.

Teach for America: Here We Go Again

2012-01-18T02:28:00.001-05:00

It's been so long since I last complained about Teach for America, I apparently just couldn't go another day without. Now is a particularly conflicting time for me as some of the first students I taught are being accepted into Teach for America. In the last weeks, I've gotten more than a few Facebook messages from former students either telling me of their acceptance or asking my opinion.

I have no idea how to react. There's a part of me that wants to go on a tirade, wants to tell them everything I think about TFA. And there's another part of me that is so proud of their commitment to education, because I don't think I have any former students who are using TFA to get into law school or work in Congress.

It's just so frustrating to listen to those new to the profession preach about their commitment to educational equity without the necessary understanding of what really drives policy and inequity.

Alas, I should keep my mouth shut. I was no different six years ago. I did not have the background knowledge I have now, and I was downright ignorant of the way education policy works and what drives it. (Inequity is no accident.)

My frustration has me typing this blog post on TFA's cons (more for my own purposes than anyone else's - plenty of capable bloggers and journalists have done extensive work on reasons to be wary of TFA here, here, here, here, and here). In essence, I'm trying to figure out how to explain my worries about Teach for America to a soon-to-be college graduate without sounding like a crackpot. How can I tell them what I worry about without making them think I'm against their ambitions? Without being overly vitriolic?

Let's see what I can do....

Without boring the hell out of you, I think there are four main reasons I have such a problem with Teach for America.

1) It assumes that quality teaching is an effect of innate ability and passion rather than experience. It uses this specious line of argument to place woefully under-prepared 22-year-olds (the majority of whom do not stay in classrooms long enough to learn from their errors) in front of our most underprivileged students whose quality education demands so much more. On top of this, it expects these poor recruits to be doing graduate school work WHILE teaching. Perhaps more detrimental, TFA, along with the media, have found a way to convince the public that this is appropriate.

(Side story: I was in a doctor's office in Manhattan last year getting tests done to try to determine the origin of some weird chest pains when the doctors asked what I did for a living. I told them, and they asked if I was in Teach for America. My expression must have betrayed my feelings because they asked what problems I had with the organization. I just shook my head. "Who's going to teach those kids if not for TFA?" they asked. "How about qualified professionals?" I said coldly. "I wouldn't feel very good right now if you two were just out of undergrad and about to go to med school, would I?")

2) Teach for America indoctrinates its recruits into a vision of quality teaching that understands test scores as synonymous with student achievement. (See here on why this is something of a problem.) This is perhaps the point for which the negative effects take the longest to see clearly. You can go back in forth in your head for years on how valuable standardized tests are, and to what degree they should be used in judging educational quality. I have come to the strong opinion that, the way they're currently being used, these tests do far more to harm than good.

3) TFA has transformed from an organization that used to talk about putting itself out of business to a public relations behemoth. Every year it scrounges more money from Congress and more money from districts for placing its low-cost teachers in positions that demand the most experienced (districts have to pay TFA for each recruit they accept). In the disgusting world of hard-ball education politics, this allows districts either strapped for cash or under the leadership of those who believe the public sector should be starved of funds to point to TFA's propaganda around closing the achievement gap as justification for paying its teaching force significantly less money by forcing out experienced teachers in favor of much cheaper TFA recruits (as happened just recently, and so disgustingly, in Memphis.)

4) It was founded by a Princeton college senior who never had (and still never has) worked in a single school in her entire life, much less an underprivileged school. Listening to Wendy Kopp speak (or reading her book) is like doing a case study on narcissistic personality disorder. Self-righteous would be an understatement, which sort of explains the flaws noted above.

From my perspective, TFA is, at best, analogous to putting a band-aid on a brain hemorrhage. At worst, it is a racist, staggeringly arrogant organization that profits (both in money and fame) off the poor.

How was that for nicely communicating my feelings? Pretty crappy, huh?

It's not the TFA corps members I have problems with (although a good many of them personify the organization's arrogance and lack of respect for the teaching profession); it's the notion and push behind the endeavor itself. I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who join TFA out of a sincere desire to effect change and teach their hearts out. I just caution them to be prepared for a potential rude awakening. (See Gary Rubinstein's beautiful post on why he joined TFA, and why it's no longer needed.)

To the new TFA corps members for the coming year, I wish you all the best, but try to keep an open mind during the propaganda process, I mean, "Institute."

Something to Consider

2012-01-16T17:35:00.001-05:00

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City and has been cross-posted at Gothamschools. You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

The assistant principal’s office is crammed into the corner of the second floor of the nearly ninety-year-old James Monroe Building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Behind me the door into the hallway, an opening into the dizzying array of students from different schools and languages from different countries. Before me sits the instructional coach our administration hired to help us make sense of outcomes-based teaching.

I sit in tennis shoes, jeans, a flannel shirt, and keys hanging from my three-year-old caribiner attached to my right belt loop. My unshaven face pushes against my right hand pushes against my elbow pushes against the desk frustrated. Not frustrated because of my missed planning period, nor the student I chased down for stealing breakfast that morning. Not because stacks of papers loom over us on both sides of the desk we're working at like Manhattan skyscrapers, nor because boxes of books and newly ordered materials touch nearly every floor tile, making the movement from one corner of the office to another a journey four times longer than it would otherwise take. Frustrated for a different reason.

Peggy and I stare at the plan I’ve created. “These outcomes are really nice, very impressive. I’m just worried you may be overestimating the students' ability levels. This looks like something you’d do in freshman-level college course.”

How would you know if I’m overestimating their ability. They’re my students.... is my thought, but only fleeting. A brief ego shield that quickly melts away under the heat of reality.

It’s so easy to fantasize about teaching the really interesting things about history and social studies that require the background knowledge they don’t yet have to really engage in, to expose them to rigorous standards and high expectations that you know you don’t have time uphold.

My assistant principal looks at my eyes and asks how much sleep I got. “Enough,” I say, knowing it was at least twice as much as she got.

In a rush to cover everything at the end of the year in a meaningful way, I had created jumbo outcomes for what traditionally gets taught in history between 1870-1945 that every student would be responsible for.

Explain how liberal ideas of democracy developed during European imperialism, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.

And then I had created smaller, more manageable outcomes that only some students would be responsible for. In my teacher Narnia, students would then provide information to the whole class on their assigned outcomes.

Analyze European motives for African and Asian imperialism.

In a way, I wanted to scream, “WHY CAN’T I TEACH THIS STUFF!!! We’re supposed to be holding them to high expectations, right? We know that when we hold students to high expectations, they’ll rise to them? Isn’t that what we all learn in teacher school? The stuff I’m trying to teach isn’t even really that advanced!” But I knew every bit as well as Peggy why these outcomes were overly ambitious.

“Do you really think you can get your students to do this?”

“I KNOW every single one of them can do this, and I KNOW I could get them to do it. (In Narnia I could.) I’m just not sure I have the time and resources to help them get there....”

My assistant principal reviewing new teacher resumes on her blackberry now. Peggy slowly and confidently nods at me. Her eyes say this was the conclusion she was hoping I’d come to when she began her line of questioning. “That’s something you’ll have to consider.”

I put my backpack on and leave the office with the outcomes I’d spent an entire weekend creating.

As I walk down the stairs to my classroom, a war wages in my mind that disrupts my emotions. I’m reminded we don’t have enough rooms so that I can have a quiet last ten minutes of my planning period, so I instead choose to join the Spanish class. On one side of my head fights the six-year-old expectations for what I’d been led to believe was my immense capacity to educate students and change lives coupled with an innate lifelong idealism. On the other, the fresh lessons of the past six years learned battling student apathy, poverty, and the staggeringly negative effects of adult incompetence and ego.

As Spanish class ends and I begin digging through my backpack for the work I’d planned for my ELLs (primarily recently-arrived Dominicans), one of my students asks me if I want to collect the homework from last night. “Oh my gosh, yes! Thank you for reminding me. Please, everyone give me the homework from last night.”

Most students look at each other and snicker. One with a big smile on his face: “Come on, mister. You know we don’t do homework.”

Something I’ll have to consider.

In Case You Misunderstood Their Power for Something Lesser

2012-01-03T22:06:00.001-05:00

In case you misunderstood the power of the educational corporate reform movement for something lesser, New York City's recent inability to come to a decision over teacher evaluation will provide the appropriate lesson.

Over the holiday break, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and UFT (the teachers union in NYC) President Michael Mulgrew came to an impasse over a decision on how teachers should be evaluated and how U-rated teachers should be removed (more on that ridiculous process here) when Walcott walked out of negotiations on Friday.

This could (and probably will) cause New York City to miss out on as much as $78 million in federal money designed to aid districts that embrace the federal government's preferred educational reforms.

Walcott wrote a strongly worded op-ed in the New York Post (a newspaper vehemently anti-teacher unions owned by Rupert Murdoch) blaming Mulgrew and the UFT for refusing a "meaningful system for evaluating teachers." Walcott did not go on to clarify what his definition of "meaningful" is. He did say that "the UFT has become so opposed to accountability" that it has failed its basic functions, and that its primary objective is to protect bad teachers.

Mulgrew appeared in a poorly prepared interview on NY1's Inside City Hall during which journalist Errol Louis asked a number of questions that didn't really seem all that coherent when put together. Mulgrew responses were light on substance and failed to articulately explain good reasons for pushing back against the city's preferred evaluation plan. (I emailed Mr Louis to see if he would like to learn more about the pitfalls of standardized testing since his last question so obviously betrayed his ignorance. Perhaps you would like to do the same: errol.louis@ny1news.com.) Something similar happened on the John Gambling show. Although Gambling (who has real qualms with the UFT) had better questions, Mulgrew again failed to convince the listener of his position. The UFT is not exactly portrayed kindly by the media.

Corporate reform in New York City has forced teachers into a corner. They can either accept poorly designed evaluation methods designed to fire teachers rather than support them, OR they can be portrayed as the villains who blocked desperately needed federal aid (in the amount of $60 million) slated for the budgets of extraordinarily poorly performing schools.

So.....the question IS:

Would you, A, rather be fired for failing to write your objective in the required SMART language in the administratively approved white-board box? OR, B, Would you prefer to deny poor and minority children in failing schools more support from more teachers and better materials?

If you misunderstood corporate reform's power for something lesser, I bid you good morning. In my view, corporate reform is in the process of wiping the floor with teachers and their unions in district after district, and state after state. They have more money; they have more time; they have more powerful people; and they have better tactics. While the people who work around education on a daily basis attempt to solve the problems in their schools or districts, corporate reform is figuring out what talking points will be most effective in Newsweek and what political plays will destroy the power of teachers and their unions. Those of us doing meaningful work and understand the potentially devastating effects of corporate reform's solutions (BECAUSE WE HAVE REAL EXPERIENCE IN SCHOOLS) are, in a very real way, too exhausted to mount an effective defense after having dealt with real problems all day long.

In 1986, NYC Mayor Ed Koch appropriately noted that "New York is the city where the future comes to rehearse." It's going to be a long, long fight.

Life Learnings: 2011

2011-12-31T11:10:00.001-05:00

Another year down and it's time, once again, to reflect on the things I've learned, both in teaching and in life. In 2009, most of my learning was about the corruption and disgusting nature of gritty inner-city politics. In 2010, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what constitutes real(,) valuable(,) meaningful knowledge and how we go about acquiring that and passing it on.

In 2011 I finished teaching in New York, spent the summer looking for a job, and finally moved out to Washington State to work in the Highline School District just south of Seattle. And this is what I learned along the way:

1) No matter how long you've taught, being new to a school will always make for a stressful year

Here I am in my sixth year of teaching. You would think I'd be starting to get a hold on it by now, that I might be halfway decent. You know, have a few tricks up my sleeve. But here I am, once again, in a new school feeling like a novice. It's true; I'm not completely oblivious to the fundamental things that make the classroom work. (Thank god I'm not a new new teacher, one of those who's new to the whole idea of teaching.) But I'm still stuck back at square one when it comes to developing curriculum and ordering my classroom. I'm better as a result of all my previous experiences, and I have a lot of ideas that I think will really make a difference. But most of them cannot be implemented until I understand the school's politics, culture, and systems. Here's hoping for a dramatically better beginning for the 2012-2013 school year.

2) If we want public education to be democratic, we have to allow students to practice democracy

Democracy is a long, hard, draining process. You have to let it take its time. You have to rethink its processes with different groups. And you have to believe in it. When you do, it's powerful.

I'm afraid we do a relatively poor job teaching our youth about the power and importance of democracy in this country. Democracy is about so much more than just voting. (I've always thought of voting as the least democratic of the democratic things that you can do.)

If we infuse democracy in schools in as many ways as possible, we'll empower students and parents, and we'll build meaningful community and culture. Why doing this is often considered to be part of some uber left-wing educational ideology is beyond me. (More on this learning here and here.)

3) When the odds are stacked against you, sometimes you have to redefine success

My idea of success with my sophomore world history class this year included: making meaningful strides in all of my students' abilities to read social studies texts, introducing all of (and hopefully instilling some) of the historical habits of mind, exposing my students to the all skills required in the social studies, and asking them to all think deeply about hard questions about history.

Three months in to this year, I came to the conclusion that I would have to redefine success. The class has refused to cooperate and the energy in it is toxic. I accept part of the blame. I'm far from perfect. But I doubt there are many teachers out there who could have accomplished the goals I set with this group of students without a very strong previous relationship with them. This is not to say that these students are incapable of learning. Every single one of them can make immense academic progress. But the system and its lack of resources have failed them. And, of course, many of them have chosen to fail themselves for they perceive as a lack of more desirable options.

4) Stress can affect you without you even knowing you have stress

I felt a strange pain surge like a lightning bolt through my forehead and something strange move in the back of my head. I was sitting at my dinning room table in my apartment in Washington Heights working on a blog post. I looked up from the screen and asked myself, "What the hell was that?!" I looked out the window for about three seconds wondering if everything was okay when my heart rate shot through the roof. I had no idea what was going on. These symptoms accompanied with bouts of vertigo and strange feelings in my chest had me in about ten different specialists' offices on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for about two weeks in the beginning of May. After tons of tests by family doctors, cardiologists, and neurologists, I was finally told that I was "stressed out." And I didn't even know that I'd been stressed.

All this made me decide that I was doing too much at work, spending too much time blogging, and attending too many education related rallies and protests. I decided to leave New York and move back to the West Coast. I learned I have to be more careful about the effects that my work and lifestyle might be having on my body.

I include this story on this blog only because I think it's indicative of many similar experiences that passionate urban teachers have and provides a warning to others entering the profession.

5) The importance of working together

In July I went to the SOS Conference in Washington, DC. I met hundreds of amazing educators there, all rallying together to fight the stubbornness of corporate reform, and I learned the impact that people can have when they come together. My experience there in combination with what I've read over the past year about the Arab Spring and similar protests across the world has reminded me that for all the reasons so many have to complain about this world that we live in, I am happy to remember that it truly is the people who have the power, and that we really do have the government we deserve. Perhaps we might soon deserve something better...

6) Small schools all the way

After now having worked in three large traditional comprehensive high schools and two small schools, I am an adamant proponent of small schools in underprivileged communities. Their size facilitates the teaching of real democracy; they seem to attract a larger percentage of brilliant and dedicated educators; they allow a staff to think and act outside of the box more often; and they allow staff to build phenomenal relationships with students and parents in ways that's simply not possible in larger schools. There are plenty of real disadvantages. But when it comes to creating powerful schools in poor communities, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that large schools are preferable.

7) The importance of bilingualism

When I started teaching I was nervous that I had no idea how to educate English language learners. I saw them as an obstacle and their background as a hindrance. Now I embrace them and understand their background as a strength, something I can use to enhance their educational experience (along with that of their classmates).

It is frankly easier to learn English when you have another language to support your English language development. My own learning of Spanish has taught me amazing things about literacy instruction. It has also reminded me that the more language you learn (and the more languages you learn), the more the world opens up to you.

For this, I largely have the International Network for Public Schools to thank, one of whose schools I worked at in the Bronx.

8) Schools are NOT scalable

As much as every edupreneuer (a stupid word if there ever was one) would love to believe that a highly functioning school should be able to be replicated elsewhere by following the strategies of the original school, it's just not that easy. Public education is not the corporate world, and teachers and students are not widgets. It's all about context, context, context - and intelligent, passionate educators at each and every school setting thinking about their specific challenges and unique solutions to them. See this post for more.

9) I think authentic knowledge is easier to cultivate in low-income communities

This might be more of a learning for a coming year. But recently I've been wondering if authentic(,) meaningful knowledge is more easily built by capable teachers in low-income schools, where students and community members are less trusting of authority. Although I've never taught in a high-income community, I've visited such schools. I notice that students in these schools seem to believe that real knowledge can only be real if it's in a book, comes from a teacher's mouth, or has been reported on by a institution of higher education.

Although Patrick Finn suggests otherwise in Literacy with an Attitude (amazing book - READ IT!), I tend to think that helping students question the world (and authority) and create their own knowledge is probably easier in a low-income community, where many students are already used to doing it. Thoughts?

10) Learn, relearn, and relearn.

I am continually frustrated when I realize I've made a mistake I've made already and forgot to apply the lessons I learned. The second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth time I do it, though, at least I apply those lessons more quickly. This happens so often in the classroom. A teacher has so many variables to consider in creating a lesson, it's often quite easy to leave out an important step that you should have remembered to include. You're halfway through the lesson, you look at your plan, you see the blank stares on their faces, and you think "I can't believe I forgot to give them a visual!"

I'm learning that learning is often a lot more about relearning. The mistake is made over and over because so many things have happened in your brain between the last time you made that mistake and now - and because you applied to appropriate lesson to a number of lessons in the meantime, you sort of forgot to make a point of remembering it. The nice part about this whole relearning process, however, is that the mistakes always occur in new and different contexts, which allows you to see some different nuance to the lesson you hadn't noticed before. You add this to your understanding and create a new equilibrium. You've grown; you've learned! It's frustrating, but it counts.

Conclusion

I notice that my learnings, once again, are about authentic knowledge, but this year that's been coupled with a lesson in the power of democracy and democratic practices in schools. As I say every year, some of these learnings are things you've always been told and sort of always "knew," but didn't really understand in a meaningful way until you had that experience that conveys their importance with clarity and power. Despite their power, words can often be very inadequate conveyors of truth.

That's all for this year. 103 posts. Thanks for reading. Happy New Year!

Charter Schools in Washington? Brian Jones and Charter School Wars From Across the Country Show Us Why We Should Be Cautious

2011-12-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

For years, free-market advocates have been pushing for the admittance of charter schools in the state of Washington. They're public schools paid for with taxpayer money, say their proponents. But charter schools are far from that simple. Charter schools are causing extreme conflict in school districts across the country.

In New York, charter schools are encroaching on traditional public schools' space, literally. Those rooms that used to be your traditional public school's literacy rooms? This year they serve as the new charter school's principal's office. You see, space is limited in NYC. Sometimes when charters open, they push into traditional public school space, their rooms, their cafeterias, their gyms. More than that, charters seem to receive preferential treatment from many corporate-minded school districts. Watch Brian Jones, a teacher activist in NYC, explain to Bloomberg's Panel for Education Policy last week why the community is outraged by the way their traditional public schools are being treated in comparison to charter schools. (At the bottom of the clip it says, "Dec. 14. 2001." That's a typo - should read, "Dec. 14. 2011.")

Go here to learn more about how some banks have been using charter schools to make profit.

Watch the clip below from Los Angeles earlier this year on how some community members have felt the opening of charter schools is cheating their children out of a quality education.

Last week, the Miami Herald printed the last part of a three-piece series on the demographic mismatch being created between charter schools and traditional public schools that has real implications for increasing future socio-economic disparity.

What seems clear to me is that charter schools offer an immense opportunity for us to reshape the way we educate our students in this country. What is also clear, however, is that if charters are not closely regulated, they will do far more to destroy our democracy than they will to improve it. As we continue to consider this issue in the state of Washington, we need to be asking ourselves how much we believe in democratic education and how much we trust our government to regulate charter schools in advancing that aim.

Teacher Evaluation: It Shouldn't Be That Important Right Now, But I'll Blog About It Anyway

2011-12-15T22:06:00.002-05:00

The following post was cross-posted at TeachHub.com.

Teacher evaluation is at the top of the list of things to talk about in the education reform world. I've largely stayed away from writing about it on this blog because I think there are a lot of more fundamental changes that need to be made in public education before we spend time revamping teacher evaluation. It seems to me that a lot of new evaluation schemes are attempting to hold teachers accountable for factors they don't control and penalize them for shortcomings for which they are not responsible.

Nonetheless, I recently participated in two teacher webinars that spent a decent amount of time discussing teacher evaluation and the way it's done around the country. So it got me thinking. But I'd like to make it clear that while changes in teacher evaluation need to happen (and that those changes could definitely have positive effects on student achievement) I think this intense discussion about the importance of teacher evaluation is off-base. It's putting the cart before the horse. Until we support teachers adequately, find useful ways of assessing their efficacy, and murder the ridiculous notion that student achievement is synonymous with standardized test scores, I believe improvements in teacher evaluation systems will make either only small improvements in student achievement in some places or harm it in others.

So now that that's out of the way....

How should teachers be evaluated?

Teachers know that a lot of the work that goes into creating a highly-functioning classroom is done outside of the school day. It's done during phone calls home to parents, during conferences with students after school, during planning, curricular development, and grading. However, in four of the five schools I've worked at, my evaluators (all of whom have been administrators except for one master educator in Washington, DC) have all been far to busy to gather evidence of my abilities as a teacher outside of the short classroom observation.

Teachers know that classroom observations provide evaluators with a lot of basic information regarding a teacher's ability to relate with students, use effective classroom management techniques, and respond to student misunderstanding. However, they do not allow evaluators to see all of the work teachers do after school, long-term instruction over multiple days, or the way they collaborate with their colleagues.

So it seems clear that the limited classroom observation model of teacher evaluation has significant flaws. In response, a number of teacher evaluation systems have been constructed across the country that have attempted to address this flaw. In DC, IMPACT asks evaluators to consider a teachers' expertise in a number of different domains, using test scores as one indicator of teacher effectiveness. States across the country have recently been passing laws requiring that test scores be included in teacher evaluations. In some states, teachers who do not teach tested subjects are having their evaluations based in part on the way their students perform in the tested subjects they don't teach (a beautiful critique of that idiotic idea here).

Useful? Maybe sometimes for some teachers. There is a large body of growing evidence, however, that suggests these evaluation models are unreliable at identifying teachers who are actually good at getting students to learn the things they should be learning.

If the purpose of teacher evaluation is to support teachers' professional development and occasionally remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, then it's clear that we have a long way to go before we create a system that's useful. After teaching in four states, five schools, and under six evaluators, I cannot honestly say that I've made any significant professional development as a result of my evaluations. Sure - I've had a few useful conversations about what I might do differently with a particular lesson, but the real objective of all of the evaluations in my career has been to fill out the district-required paperwork. And there was that one evaluation in DC during which my evaluator tried to tarnish my reputation for writing negative things about that school in my blog.

When I really sit down and think about creating teacher evaluations that would be useful and meaningful, I think about successful ways I've found to evaluate my students. I spend a lot of time supporting them in thinking about ways they're supposed to be improving and asking them how they might show me that they're improving. It means communicating expectations to them clearly and often so that they come to believe in the utility of what we're doing in class. It means supporting them in thinking about their own development and that of their peers. I think my evaluation system is most effective when self and peer assessments occur often and teacher assessment occurs habitually but less often. If teacher evaluation is going to be about supporting teachers and not firing them, then I believe a similar system would work better than what we're currently using.

As much as teacher evaluation could use work, I can't help but feel that I'm contributing to a conversation that is major red herring. Money and time spent revamping teacher evaluation, especially in poor schools, will be significantly less useful than offering teachers real support, lowering class sizes, purchasing basic materials, improving community relationships,....and the list goes on. But that's generally not what moves educational opportunists up the career ladder in our current reform environment.

Yes - let's talk about improving teacher evaluations, but let's not make it the first item on our agenda. Let's put it on the back burner until we've solved some of our more fundamental problems.

Sometimes You Just Have to Kick a Pole

2011-12-05T23:21:00.001-05:00

Three people sit in the open room just outside the principal's office: two students and the school counselor. Demetrius refuses to go to class and Rosie is sitting in a chair with her left foot propped up and sitting in the chair next to her. She doesn’t look happy.

The counselor tells Demetrius, “We need you to go to Ms. Smith’s class.”

“No. I’m not going.”

“Why not.”

“Cause I don’t want to.”

“Well then what are you going to do? You’re going to have to call your mom and have her come pick you up.”

“Noooooo. Can’t I just walk home?”

“No. If you do that, then you’re really going to be in trouble.”

I pass this part of their conversation as I gather things from my box. On my way out, I ask Rosie what happened.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow....if I come...”

I find Rosie hopping out of the office about an hour later with a group of about ten friends.

“Rosie! Tell me what happened!?”

Rosie tells me that this other girl was trying to make her mad. She puts her hand to her cheek, fingers pointing up to block others from seeing what she’s saying, and whispers, “Karen.” Rosie got so mad that she went and kicked a pole. And then she couldn’t walk anymore.

I can’t take it. Rosie’s smile, personality, love for gossip, and hop out of the office crack me up.

“She was trying to make you mad?” I ask between laughing.

“Oh my god! I’m never telling you anything!” she says half smiling, knowing she looks foolish.

“Wait. Sorry, Rosie,” I say, wiping the smile from my face. “So this girl was trying to make you mad?”

“Yes.”

“I guess she got what she wanted.”

“Yea.”

Rosie has been working hard to be better about her grades, gossip, and drama. Kicking a pole might be a painful step in the right direction.

Peer Influence Matters

2011-12-02T00:12:00.001-05:00

A few days ago I wrote about the real problems caused by distractions in the classroom. Today I’d like to focus on other ways students can be affected by their peers.

In my sophomore world history class (probably the most challenging class I’ve ever had the opportunity to teach), there are a handful of particularly bright students failing. They’re what some of my former colleagues would have referred to as fence riders.

The idea behind fence riders is this: in any given class, there is a small group of students who will act like scholars no matter who is around them. There is another small group of students who will act just the opposite no matter who is around them. In a class like the one I’m describing, squelching negative behaviors from the latter group early in the semester is key to avoiding something just short of a classroom management apocalypse. But the horsemen of my doomsday ride the fence, rather than horses, and there are a lot more than four of them. They base their behaviors on the behaviors of their peers. And I’m noticing a trickle-down effect.

I have a small handful of students (group 1) in that class who will deface and steal my property; run, jump, and throw things around the room the second they notice my eyes are not on them; and use swear words toward each other and toward me - often with impunity since I have neither the time nor energy to follow up with every misbehavior.

There is another slightly larger group (group 2) of students who exist just next to the students in group 1 on the mis/behavior continuum. Were they at the end of this continuum in my class, the worst one might witness would probably include off-task behavior and the occasional cuss word. But when group 1 has lowered the expectations for positive behavior with my tacit approval (as it’s obvious to all students that I cannot follow up on every single misbehavior, especially the ones I don’t see) to such depths, the behaviors of group 2, group 3, and group 4 (on the mis/behavior continuum) becomes that much worse. Even those students who normally achieve at high levels in other classes regularly allow themselves to be distracted from their work and rarely turn anything in.

One of those normally high achieving students (we’ll call him Sean) began the year in my class with an A. Every assignment was dutifully taken care of; he stayed after school a number of hours working on the material; and he always paid attention in class. After a few months, his effort dropped off precipitously. He now spends most of his time in class joking and avoiding his work. I haven’t received an assignment from him in nearly two weeks.

A negative classroom culture established by a handful of disruptive students has, in many ways, defeated my efforts thus far. I was new to the school at the beginning of the year (with no curriculum) and dreadfully unprepared for the onslaught of disruptive behavior that came my way. I’ve retreated, amassed my reinforcements, and begun my counterattack after realizing that my attempts at improving the class through democratic discussion were routinely being subverted by those group 1 students, the ones that few other students have been brave enough to stand up to or speak out in front of.

My point is this: peers play an enormous role in a student’s education. A student like Sean would excel with me as a teacher in a classroom full of highly achieving peers who would look down on him for not turning in his homework. In his reality, he’s failing. Adults don't warn their children about the negative effects of peer pressure for nothing; it can have powerful impacts on a person's behavior.

But contrast that reality with assumptions being made by educational policymakers. In our nation’s capital, DC Council Chairman Kwame Brown is drafting a bill that would recruit “effective” teachers (as judged by IMPACT) in wards 2 and 3 to work in DC’s most underprivileged schools, in wards 7 and 8. In New York City, Michael Bloomberg recently said that in a perfect world, we would double our class sizes and pay teachers twice as much (since there would be half as many). Effective educators are more important variables in a student’s education than his or her peers, the thinking goes.

Policymakers are missing something: experience, and the perspective that comes with it. Mr Bloomberg needs to know that doubling the class size in an affluent school where students are highly motivated, and pressure each other to perform academically, might not do society all that much harm. But double it in my environment and you may as well just stop trying to educate altogether and spend the money somewhere else. (It reminds me of the summer I spent teaching English to seventy 12, 13, and 14-year-old Liberian refugees in a hot West African schoolhouse with no windows. I walked away from that experience positive that the only person who learned anything in that room was me.) Mr Brown would do well to consider the immense number of variables that contribute to the quality of a given learning environment and the factors that led to those teachers in wards 2 and 3 being labeled “effective” in the first place (I highly suspect one of the most important was the students in front of them).

Despite the deluge of teacher-is-the-most-important-factor talking points gushing from politicians’ mouths these days, there is, as always, significantly more to the story. Teacher quality is undoubtedly extremely important. But treating it as if it were the only factor that matters does irreparable damage to both the meaningfulness of the discussion around school reform and the quality of education our students receive.

Distraction Matters

2011-11-29T21:36:00.001-05:00

I spent a large portion of my Thanksgiving Break doing things like watching The Walking Dead and Dexter. (I don't really love either of the shows, but my affinity for both end-of-the-world scenarios and serial killers doing good work keeps me interested enough.)

I should have been mapping out my world history curriculum for next semester, which I've been telling myself I would do since the year began. I had also planned on doing some research into valuable media outlets for Washington State education policy and news. (Keeping up with education news was so much easier in the big urban districts on the East Coast.)

Instead of being even moderately responsible, I pretty much slothed away my five-day break. And while I had a blank word document out on a number of occasions and had begun searching the internet for Washington education media sources, I repeatedly found the distraction of mediocre entertainment too hard to resist. I began school on Monday disappointed in my lack of productivity, and I wondered why I hadn't done more.

I realized I hadn't done more because I'd been distracted. Time and again, I'd allowed myself to sacrifice a moderately challenging/rewarding cognitive task in the name of relatively worthless entertainment. And here I am with nothing to show for it, except for perhaps the following realization.

The single largest battle I fight in the classroom on a daily basis is against distraction. Most of my freshmen literacy and sophomore world history students would prefer a distraction to the effort of real thinking. On the other hand, most of those same students will engage in real thinking if you force/encourage them into situations in which they realize distraction will not be available for a meaningful amount of time. Providing such situations for students drastically improves the quality of not only their education, but the education of students around them.

Unfortunately, I teach in a small room without enough desk space for the thirty students I have in some of my classes. I also teach those classes to students who are not getting their social/emotional needs met at home or outside of school. Class time, for some of them, is among the only time in their day during which they have an opportunity to relate with people who like them and seem to care about them. "Sorry. I just don't feel like working today," they'll tell me.

I can teach my face off offering them stellar direct instruction, but facilitating meaningful work and thinking is the majority of my job, which means giving students time to practice and experiment with the skills I'm trying to teach them. Given the constraints of both space and a student/teacher ratio of about 30:1, offering students a quality education in this environment becomes an immense challenge, if not an impossibility. Many students who might otherwise complete their work around more studious peers are unable to resist the lure of distraction coming from students who need that attention they're not getting at home. How can I blame them? I'm grown with two college degrees and I often have a difficult time resisting distraction.

I was working with a few students today during my advisory on some simple algebra. One of them was having trouble solving a problem and clearly lacked a basic understanding of even rudimentary arthritic. Bogged down with the burden of low self-efficacy, he did everything from ask why there's a scar above my eye, to bang on the table, to ask his friend what his favorite kind of music was, to scream, "I LOVE CHICKEN!" while I was in the middle of explaining how variables work. And despite the way I've just made it sound, he's a pretty good kid overall, with the capacity to learn in the right environment.

But contrary to popular ed reform talking points, the right environment for this student simply cannot include 29 or 34 of his similarly distractable peers, especially in a small room with barely enough desks or chairs.

In a clip from an episode of Persepectives from last week, Leonie Haimson (NYC Education Activist and Director of Class Size Matters) explains (at 4:40) why smaller class sizes are beneficial for students, particularly at-risk youth who may be significantly behind their more affluent peers. My experiences in the classroom seriously jive with what Ms. Haimson says, ESPECIALLY when she says poor and minority students receive twice the benefits of smaller class sizes. Unfortunately, smaller class sizes are nearly always afforded to more affluent students, who also, unsurprisingly, are regularly afforded more experienced teachers.

Whether we admit it or not, the quality of a given educational experience has as much to do with the number and personalities of a student's peers as it does with available resources or the quality of the teacher. I am positive that every one of my students is capable of receiving an excellent education and using it to better their lives. I do not, however, believe that I am capable of providing it to them under current circumstances.

You begin your teaching career believing (either due to arrogance, idealism, naivity, or misinformation) that you alone have the capacity to offer any given student a path toward a positive future. Organizations like Teach for America rely on this belief, tweeting things like: "Join Teach for America because poverty is NOT destiny." Then you step into a real classroom. When you fail at first, you think that you need more experience. If you just knew more about teaching, you could honestly offer every student an amazing education. And then, eventually, you run up against reality. You've been doing this for years, constantly rethinking your approach, and while you know you could always improve, you also realize that there is a political/economic reality greatly hindering what could be. And it's a simple reality: we refuse to admit that education is expensive, especially the education of the underprivileged, and therefore refuse to pay for it.

My students need more space, more teachers who have time to develop curriculum and reflect on student work, and fewer peers in the classroom offering them opportunities for distraction. That's expensive, but not prohibitively so for the richest country on earth by far, not by a long shot.

In the same way that humanity has the capacity to feed, clothe, and provide shelter to every human on earth but chooses not to, Americans equally have the capacity to provide an excellent education to every student and choose not to. We apparently prefer using students as guinea pigs in attempting to prove asinine ideological contentions far removed from the everyday reality of the classroom in the name of ego, reputation, and keeping money away from public services to basing our reform efforts on the quite sufficient knowledge and experience of those who have worked long and hard in schools for decades.

Something to Be Thankful For?

2011-11-24T18:10:00.001-05:00

"We're failing." I wonder how many times I've heard that. "As a failing school, there are some changes that need to be made around here." All five schools I've worked at (in four states) have devoted significant time and energy to avoid the label.

At my current school, clear expectations for "improvement" have been communicated to the administration. Those expectations are communicated to staff on at least a weekly basis - although possibly less clearly than whence they originate, maybe a little more sugar-coated.

And so the tension is with us again. It's always with us. What does it mean to improve our school?

The district will provide us with paid time to work on their version of improvement. It means thinking about data, the kind of data that most teachers either don't trust or don't understand. And, most importantly, it means thinking about how to change the data that count to the state or the feds, the data that can change funding and freedom.

Teachers wonder when they'll be paid to change the school in ways they see as meaningful: lesson study, collaborative teacher support groups (called critical friends groups at my current school), time for curriculum development, or sharing and evaluating common assessments and student work. The buy-in for district ideas about improvement is generally low. Just another item on the month's calender, just another hoop to jump through before you can go home or get back to real work.

It's somewhat ironic, I think, that the same ideology that has imposed this quasi-Orwellian state of teacher work on schools has also spent lots of cash on bringing in lots of ambitious, young, type-A personalities into the profession (although, to be sure, not for the long-haul.) As my former AP put it, Teach for America made teaching sexy; it made it cool for privileged college students to help poor kids. But these type-A personalities, as teachers, are expected not to think long and hard about education and its nuances, but to raise the numbers.

I'm just now reading Working by Studs Terkel, the 1972 oral history of working men and women from across the country. It's made clear to me the fate of teaching in this country that I hadn't, for some reason, quite understood. In the introduction, a farm worker complains that "the careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good." A fierce commitment to decisions of the free market have been destroying the creative side of humanity that needs to take pride in its work since the eighteenth century. Education, neither producing material goods nor part of the private sector, has only recently begun to suffer the symptoms of an ideology immune to nuance.

On Thanksgiving day, I can nevertheless be thankful that teachers in the state of Washington are not suffering these symptoms nearly as severely as teachers in other parts of the country. While we are jumping through hoops and complaining about demands made on our time, we are not being held responsible for data we have very little control over. We're not yet being threatened with our jobs for failing to write the day's objective in the administratively approved objective box in the upper right-hand corner of the white board, nor are we being berated for not engaging five different learning styles simultaneously, or not updating our word wall on a daily basis.

NLCB says we're failing. But to ourselves and to our colleagues, it looks more like we're doing the best with what we have.

Teachers Make Too Much Money, Right?

2011-11-07T23:13:00.000-05:00

A week ago, researchers from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (both free-market think tanks in DC) released a report claiming that American public school teachers, as a whole, are significantly overpaid.

Jason Richwine of Heritage and Andrew Biggs of AEI base the claim on their perceived market value of the average teacher, who, they say, tends to be at a cognitive disadvantage in comparison to their counterparts in the private market.

Teachers, many of whom pour their heart and soul into what they see as a thankless job, scoff at the notion that they're underpaid. They also understandably take issue with the assertion that they're essentially stupider than comparable workers in the private sector.

But after some reflection and thought, I'm not sure those are the most important points to take issue with.

The report brings up some interesting points all sides would do well to consider. Richwine and Biggs point out that test takers (across a number of tests) who say their future profession will be teaching typically perform worse than those who hope to enter other professions. They note that education courses are notoriously less rigorous than perhaps engineering or math courses typically are. They argue that because private school teachers make less, public school teachers are shielded from the realities of the free market. Lastly, they note that teachers who switch from the private sector into teaching typically take a salary increase while the reverse is true for those who leave public education for jobs in the private sector.

All this to show that school districts are paying teachers more than they have to. Richwine and Biggs would presumably argue that we could have the same quality of public teaching force for a significantly smaller sum of money ($120 billion to be exact).

The question at hand is what criteria constitute a basis on which to rely in determining the proper salary to pay a teacher. According to Richwine and Biggs, "public workers should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills.... Ideally, if a teacher's skills are worth $X in the private marketplace that teacher should be paid $X by the government." But are there other factors one might consider in determining the salary level of a given public worker?

Should we, for example, consider the inevitable negative reactionary costs that would be associated with the effects of students lacking access to teachers or schools?

Should we, for example, consider the piles of paperwork that public employees have to complete as a result of poorly considered and unfunded mandates?

Should we, for example, consider what it takes to love and care about children who lack experience with adults who love and care about them?

Should we, for example, consider what level of compensation would be necessary to draw "cognitively" talented individuals into teaching?

Should we, for example, consider the social irresponsibility that comes with taking advantage of committed teachers by assuming rational individuals will always seek the highest paying job rather than the job that brings them the most contentment?

Should we, for example, consider what price an effective democracy is worth, and that the private market would likely offer next to nothing for a committed educator to work in an impoverished community?

Should we, for example, consider that public services have long been provided precisely because the private market would not independently demand them despite their social utility?

Should we, for example, consider that the free market might not be the infallibly reliable tool for compelling economic and social justice many of us were indoctrinated that it is back when we were forming our ideologies as undergraduates?

I tend to agree with most of what Richwine and Biggs highlighted in their report. The teaching profession is not exactly teeming with would-be Stephen Hawkings. And the private market would probably offer a lesser salary to teachers than most school districts currently do. But you'll have to forgive me for distrusting a decision-making tool that offers billions of dollars for performing services with no identifiable social utility (the creation and management of collateralized debt obligations or the throwing of touch downs) and next to nothing for offering homeless people a way out of poverty.

The free market is not God. It does not speak with divine authority. It represents the billions of both good and bad decisions made by millions of consumers of our distinct culture (some rational, some not; some with means, some without; some who give a damn about a fair society, and many who don't; some on a whim, and some after considerable deliberation) on a daily basis. If that's the basis on which you think teachers' salaries should be decided, then perhaps we could be fair and ask only that your former teachers be the ones who suffer.