Category Archives: school reform

It’s Not About Unions Either

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I caught the tail end of this CBS News report this morning. It’s the typical kind of media coverage of teacher unions that gives one hugely horrible example of how tenure protected someone who shouldn’t have been in the classroom in the first place and then suggests we need to get rid of unions completely. If the laws are making it difficult to get an abuser out of the classroom then those laws need to be modified. But doing away with teacher unions, which is the real purpose of the multi-billionaires who are funding this lawsuit, is not the answer if the question is how do we make teachers more effective and students more successful?

How great it would be if the billionaires put their money into the classroom to provide coaching and support for teachers to help them become more effective. Think of how far all that money that is currently going to lawyers on both sides would go if the two groups worked together to identify the most challenging environments where teachers, students and their families need substantial social, emotional and economic support to succeed. Let’s move beyond union busting to have the harder conversations about equity and opportunity in this country. Maybe like they are doing in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

At the end of the piece, the commentators all agreed that providing the best education for these kids is the answer to everything so even though they sympathized with the teacher, we just have to guarantee that a good teacher is in every classroom, and they seemed to support this lawsuit. Certainly having effective teachers is essential, but I’m not sure this lawsuit would really make that happen. And, honestly, the better answer to everything would be to figure out how to lift every kid out of poverty.

Two Views of Unions

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Last week’s reading included books with two very different views of labor unions, and Labor Day seems the perfect time to pull together the blog post I’ve been drafting.

Two books–For the Win by Cory Doctorow and Class Warfare by Steven Brill–deal with labor unions from two very different perspectives.  

As with much of his fiction, Doctorow’s story is set in a not-too-distant future where young people work in virtual sweat shops gold farming in games for businessmen. They love playing the games and the money they bring in makes a real difference for families where the only other jobs are in real sweat shops that offer little money and imminent dangers from both people and machines. But much of the story could have been set in America’s not-so-distant past as the virtual and real workers begin the painful process of unionizing. It also draws from current events such as the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building earlier this year. For The Win is not always an easy book to read as the characters we come to know and love suffer violence and death as they seek justice. This book would make great reading for an American history class, opening up the conversation about the functions of unions in a free market economy.

Brill’s book shows what happens when unions become part of both the economic and political landscape, receiving benefits that go far beyond those original desires to be paid a living wage and not to be fired without due cause. While I believe he does so in a biased way, clearly a huge fan of Teach for America and the passionate reformers and policy makers it spawned, his message is not to be ignored. Negotiating contracts that include 8.5% guaranteed rates of return on retirement plans can only lead to financial disaster as municipalities try to balance already out of balance budgets. Harboring teachers in rubber rooms where they sit idle while their arbitration cases make their way slowly through the process is a ridiculous waste of time and money.

I think it was that last example that bothered me the most. I was reading the book as I did summer workshops for teachers who are exploring how to leverage new technologies to create more challenging learning environments for their students. I don’t think there was any reason that the leaders in New York couldn’t work with the teachers in the rubber rooms to help them become better teachers. And Brill doesn’t give any details about what kind of interventions were provided when a teacher received her first unsatisfactory review. Perhaps at least part of the problem lay in principals who, while they seemed to be able to recognize bad teachers, were unable to help them become better teachers. Instead, we hear only the most egregious stories of the drunken educator who managed to beat the system. Principals who are trying to improve their schools by getting rid of teachers instead of developing them are heralded as heroes.

I’ve already written a bit about my summer work. One theme has emerged as I talk, plan and explore with the teachers: how to make sure we didn’t lose sight of the content that would be tested at the end of the year even as we try to incorporate critical thinking and collaboration into the classrooms. Nowhere in the book does Brill suggest that the relentless testing espoused by the reformers he loves might have a chilling effect on innovation.  Rather than engage with someone like Diane Ravitch, Brill dismisses her in a few pages by suggesting that she doesn’t have any new ideas, just complaints. And the book conveniently ends before the cheating scandal that emerged in the DC public schools that may have accounted for the amazing gains touted by Rhee, certainly Brill’s golden girl.

I think the biggest take away from Brill’s book for me was the unreasonable demands we make on teachers. The mantra of the reformers was that a good teacher never sat down. Really? Not to plan? Not to reflect on practice with other teachers or principals? The old comparisons were trotted out: how badly America is doing behind countries like Finland. Brill chose to ignore the organization of Finnish schools where teachers not only sit down, they do so often:

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”
Brill’s message was that good teachers can’t have personal lives: one of his main characters ends up leaving the classroom as her commitment to her job is interfering with her marriage. There’s something wrong with that message, and even Brill starts to recognize that by the end of the book.

Spoiler alert! Throughout the book, Randi Weingarten, the leader of the United Federation of Teachers, is painted as the bad guy, standing in the way of reforms, supporting bad teachers, and just generally keeping well-intentioned people like New York Schools’ Chancellor Joel Klein from doing the best he could for kids. Brill does give her a little credit as he describes her efforts to walk the tightrope between her union members and reformers. She endures being told that she is only concerned with the adults even as she opens her own charter school. But, by the end, Brill is recommending her for the new chancellor of the New York schools because she does have the wide view. When asked about his change in tone, Brill says that he learned that school reform was “complicated.” Joe Nocera, in an Op-Ed column in the New York Times written after Weingarten held a book party for Brill, sums it up nicely:

When I asked Brill what caused his change of heart, he responded gruffly: “It’s called reporting.” The two years he spent researching school reform had given him a far richer understanding of the complexities involved in reforming the nation’s schools — and that understanding was sobering.

I would argue that most issues, whether related to labor unions or school reform, do not offer easy answers, and anyone who claims otherwise has snake oil to sell. I’m wondering if Brill is working on his more balanced look at the complexities of school reform?

Serendipity

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A question from a student, some tweets with a colleague, and I realized I had forgotten a good bit of my education history. The question had to do with why more progressive educational practices such as those found in Montessori schools did not catch in on public schools. The colleague suggested that it was the Cold War and A Nation at Risk that squelched progressive ideas. I made a vague commitment to read some history including Diane Ravitch‘s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

But it was a vague commitment and the fiction on my shelf was much more compelling. So, I was excited when I saw Bud Hunt’s post about starting an education history book club. He felt as though educators often repeat history because they don’t know enough about it:

So I’m pretty sure that my main objectives for a project like this would be basically encouraging educators and folks who impact education to better understand their history.  In my reading and writing and thinking, I’ve come to discover that people are pretty much ignorant of anything educationally relevant that happened more than ten or twenty minutes ago.  And we keep having the same conversations.  And forgetting the outcomes.  Then doing it again.

So, his suggestion is for a group to read historical documents related to education, beginning with the report of the Committee of Ten from 1892. This committee was created by the National Education Association to develop answers to questions related to what, when and how students should be learning.

I have started the report and am finding it tough going. I had trouble getting past the fact that, even though women made up more than 50% of teachers at that time, the committee included men only and seemed to celebrate that fact:

Six of the Chairmen were college men, and three were school men; while of the Secretaries, two were college men and seven school men (p. 11).

Forty seven of the ninety members of the committee were from colleges and universities but the report assures us that many have had school experiences.  But like many modern day education commissions, there were no practicing teachers on the committee.

Ravitch begins her book about school reform with the Committee of Ten, which was the first national committee to discuss how to standardize education in the United States. According to Ravitch, the one legacy of the committee’s work was the creation of the College Entrance Examination Board that set uniform standards for college admissions.

NB: Part of the reason I’ve struggled with the reading is because it took me some time to find the “right” digital version from the Internet archive. I wanted to be able to bookmark, highlight and annotate. After some experimentation, I found the ePub version to be the best although it has lots of errors that aren’t found in the online or pdf version.

 

Friday Find: Why Empathy is Important

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This blog post showed up in Zite this morning: Glimmers of Hope in the Education Debate. The writer makes the case that the two sides are not as far apart as it might seem.  He shows several places where the seemingly rigid accountability movement is opening to the possibility of non-cognitive skills:

Friedman gives a nod to the Common Core Standards, adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia — and long anathema to many in the progressive educator circles — which establish clear learning goals and competencies in math and literacy for students across multiple grade levels. Quoting Duncan, he cheerfully writes, “For the first time in our history, a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi will be measured by the same yardstick.”

Even there, however, the battle lines are no longer quite as rigid as we tend to think. Earlier this year,Expeditionary Learning — known for an educational model built on Outward Bound, with an explicit focus on empathy, collaboration, and self-discovery — was hired to develop the curriculum and professional development training for grades 3-5 of the Common Core for the state of New York.

It’s a big deal, because for the first time, it means we don’t have to choose: we don’t have to choose between academic learning and non-cognitive development; we don’t have to choose between overly burdensome (and by many accounts, meaningless) standards and nothing at all; we don’t have to choose between the interests of teachers and the interests of those who control them.

It’s worth a read: the cynical side of me couldn’t help but think that Flowers was being a Pollyana, something she says of herself. The people she reads might be interested in redefining “highly skilled worker” but I haven’t heard a whole lot of discussion of empathy in the mainstream discussion.  Maybe Paul Tough‘s book will help form a foundation for discussion. And, maybe I’m just in a negative mood since my current read is Jonathan Kozol.

The blog post is part of a larger website focused on empathy, which is sponsored by Ashoka, an organization that strives to develop the citizen sector of society. They believe that empathy is an important 21st century skill:

We know that a child who masters empathy at the age of six is less likely to bully ten years later, and that, for students, having one supportive relationship with an adult outside the family can be the difference between success and failure as an adult. And we know that far from being a “nice-to-have,” empathy – and the various skills it entails – is increasingly critical to our success at home, in the workplace, and in the world.

I was also intrigued by the writer’s comment that he had a Google alert related to empathy.  That was not the kind of search time that occurred to me so I signed up. The first email included a wide range of articles from a report about research that shows empathy can override analysis in the brain, a description of a new app designed to make commuting on the London Tube less stressful, and an interview from The Salt Lake Tribune where a CEO discusses the characteristics of great leaders, one of which is empathy.

I was a bit surprised by the depth and breadth of articles and am looking forward to future alerts. There are articles, well written blog entries and lots of videos. One series tells the story of a Tokyo teacher and his students who write notebook letters to each other:

Parent Triggers and Charters

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I am visiting in Pennsylvania, and this commentary on the need for a parent trigger law was in today’s paper. The Commonwealth Foundation supports charter schools, and the writer points to evidence that charters are outperforming public schools by demonstrating that more charters have made Adequate Yearly Progress. It’s telling that the organization does not compare scores on either the PSSA (Pennsylvania’s state test) or NAEP (the national test of progress).  That data is only used to show that scores for public schools are declining.  I can’t help but wonder why?  Could it be that, when it comes to actual scores, the charters aren’t doing any better and maybe worse than the traditional schools?

In fact, that’s what data is really showing about charters. What little reliable data can be found shows what much educational research does: results vary across schools, states, and students. Some charters do better; some charters do worse. There is certainly no research to support increasing the number of charters or that parent trigger laws lead to greater student achievement.

 

My New Reading List

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I happened to catch a bit of Jonathan Kozol on CSPAN this afternoon.  He was talking about his new book Fire in the Ashes. I was somewhat surprised to learn this his book Savage Inequalities had been banned in Tucson, Arizona, along with lots of other subversive literary works like Walden and The Tempest.  (Really, Shakespeare?) You can view a copy of the full list here.

The banned books were part of a larger ban on ethnic studies enacted by the Tucson School Board in January of this year.  They did so under threat of losing 10% of their state funding for breaking a state law that forbids “any ethnic studies classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” While auditors did not find evidence of this sedition, but it seems that in the charged atmosphere of Arizona where immigration is a divisive issue, just having a group of hispanic students gather to talk about their history and their families is enough to scare some state legislators.

The Independent Lens video Precious Knowledge is worth a view. The students are experiencing higher achievement as they are drawn into courses where they can find themselves.

Meanwhile, I may make my next 30 day challenge to start working on the banned books list as I have not read much latino literature and it’s time to get back to Thoreau and Kozol and Shakespeare as well.

 

Of Platitudes and Poverty

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In the past two weeks, I have found myself lecturing several well-meaning people on the impact of poverty in education. Both of them were people who had clearly bought into the popular reform idea that charter schools and vouchers, the favorites of corporate reformers, can overcome any and all social issues. I don’t blame them. I think it makes people feel good to think that education can be the great equalizer since it seems like we can fix education while poverty seems unsurmountable.  Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” put anyone who wanted to try to solve the poverty problem on the defensive as we seemed to be making excuses for low student achievement rather than being willing to roll up our sleeves and just teach every child no matter where they came from.  As with most slogans, it simplified an incredibly complex problem.

In fact, trying to tackle the issue of poverty as a way of boosting student achievement is all about high expectations not just for students or schools but for our society in general. We want to do more than get every kid to pass what are often lowest-common-denominator multiple choice tests. We want them to come from homes where wondering about the next meal can be replaced with wondering about the universe.

Valeria Strauss, author of The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post, has been a consistent voice in the fight to reveal the effects of poverty on student achievement. She speaks through her own voice and that of educators who speak from the front line rather than the front office. Here are a few recent columns:

And, for all those people who wonder why the US isn’t first in international testing, here’s a great blog post from Mel Riddle that links the international test (PISA) to poverty in the countries in which it is taken: http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html

 

Fighting Old Battles

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As a former teacher union member and ardent supporter of educators, I am watching the events in Wisconsin with great interest. I can’t claim great union support when I started my career; I really only joined the union because I was required to pay 80% of the fees anyway since I benefited from the contract negotiated by the union. I figured I’d chip in the extra 20% and get some of the perks like insurance and legal representation.

I saw the power of the union when, in my second year, my district went out on a six-week strike. Collective bargaining helped boost our salaries but also made sure that we were paid for all the extra work we did in support of the kids outside of our teaching responsibilities: coaching teams, advising clubs, and organizing community events. When I moved to a non-union state, I saw how the lack of the ability to negotiate meant that pay was low, extra work was uncompensated (and yet teachers still did it), and administrators made decisions without ever feeling the need to consult professional staff. Association membership was low as well, with some veterans afraid to join because of potential retaliation. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would retaliate against an organization that had no power anyway.

With that perspective as well as recent frustration with the National Education Association who seems unwilling to stand up for the professionalism of and personal sacrifice made by public educators in this country, I find myself in a quandary. I could dive into the debate: that the Wisconsin governor is using fiscal crisis to break the back of the unions, something he said he was going to do when he ran. I could cheer on my fellow teachers who are trying to remind their neighbors that they are not some elite group that has gotten rich on the backs of their fellow tax payers, who struggled with the decision to abandon their classrooms to protest and yet in doing so provide a powerful example of citizenship to their students, and who will return to those classrooms to again spend their days with the next generation, doing a sometimes thankless job with the spirit and dedication that we have come to expect and yet take for granted.

But, there is another part of me that wonders if we are watching an old battle, based on foundations that are crumbling. More and more teachers can be found outside the usual systems. As schools discover money savings related to online learning, they may choose to do an end run around more traditional educators and create more adjunct-like relationships with their professional staff. Unionists will shake their heads since adjuncting is often seen as the sweat shop of the higher ed world, but adjuncts also have a great level of freedom in terms of their schedules and their responsibilities. I love adjuncting because it means I get to teach, putting my energy into developing courses and working with my students, rather than worrying about getting published or attending faculty meetings.

Do I miss the security of a full time job with its benefits? Not really…I’m willing to make the trade off of less security for more freedom. And, as I look across the landscape, I don’t see the same kind of ongoing security that drove my father’s generation to leave home each day in order to toil for another. Teachers are getting laid off, something that was unthinkable in the past; collective bargaining is under attack; and benefits are no longer a given when you get a job. And in the worst slap in the face of all, workers who devoted their lives to a company are losing their retirement and looking at the potential of a second career as a Wal Mart greeter.

Indeed, foundations are crumbling and the protesters on both sides in Wisconsin don’t seem to understand that they are arguing over the past rather than looking towards the future. If the educators do manage to save collective bargaining, it will be something of a Pyrrhic victory as states and localities find that they simply can’t meet the agreements that they have made.

Naming Things

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I couldn’t find my phone this morning. Not plugged in. Not by my chair. So, I dialed the number and discovered it propped up against the kitchen window. I had used it yesterday for access to a recipe for Thanksgiving. There it was, spitting out the blues riffs that I had chosen for my home number, reminding me of the difficulty of names in this crossover, hybrid, multi-tasking age in which we live.

Earlier yesterday, that 3 X 4 inch piece of technology had been a camera, which I used to record the passing of the seasons as I walked the dog along the road to the winery.

This morning, I was looking for it because I needed it as a book to look up a quote to share with a friend.

Later, I will play sudoku and surf the web and listen to music.

Yet, we reduce it to one name: cell phone. And, we ban it, despite its potential to provide access to all the tools of education from textbooks to videos to pens. Because we can’t control it and schools have a responsibility to keep kids safe and we’ve seen plenty of examples where they’ve gotten in real trouble having unfettered access to the world. But there are also plenty of examples where grown ups haven’t done such a good job either. It’s THE media literacy issue that we need to discuss: consumer/producer/prosumer and the implications.

But even as I write the above, I wonder if we will miss this opportunity as well…the chance to make learning, working, and living all more humane enterprises. Anyone who knows even a little of the history of school reform understands that technology almost never drives real change. Instead, it gets incorporated into the existing structures of the system, maybe making small changes, but ultimately being changed itself.

But, at the risk of flying in the face of history, there seem to be larger forces at work here that are challenging our names for lots of things. Work: Changes in the way people access their jobs may lead them to question a school schedule that no longer matches their own. School: Easy access to educational resources makes it easier to imagine teaching your own children.

Even the word “teacher”…last Saturday I was part of a conference with pre-service teachers and I made an off hand comment about not being a real teacher. One of the 20-somethings looked at me and asked what I meant by that. I explained that while I was a teacher in many ways, since I didn’t teach the grueling schedule of a K-12 classroom teacher, I didn’t really consider myself a “real” teacher. I had it easy with my online courses, afternoon workshops and evening webinars. But, he insisted, I was a real teacher because I was doing the work of teaching. Just because I wasn’t adhering to a particular schedule or killing myself to try and meet impossible demands didn’t make a difference to him.

And, there it is: what will make the real difference in the future. Young people who are questioning everything about the world we have created and the way we have defined words like “work” and “school” and “fun.” His generation is the real force that, when joined with mobile multimedia technologies and other cultural shifts, will change definitions in ways we can’t even imagine.

Finding the People in the Picture

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This fall, I will be teaching an introductory qualitative research course. My own dissertation research used a qualitative methodology to learn more about how teachers plan for the use of technology. I interviewed and observed teachers at work in their classrooms with their students. I wrote short vignettes describing that work and the challenges they faced from high-stakes testing to inadequate access to resources. While I’m sure my research will not have much of any impact, I am proud of the way I represented the complexity of the classroom through the voice of the teachers.

For me, that’s the value of this kind of research. Certainly, quantitative research with its percentages and statistics and measures of error, is useful for wider “big picture” sort of research, providing access to general trends and suggestions for practices that might lead to greater success in whatever given area is being studied. But, qualitative research paints a different picture, of the people themselves, the ones who make saying anything definitive about education very difficult. I am often much more interested in those personal stories and insights than in the big picture ideas because they remind us that education is first, and foremost, about human beings.

If you’ve been following the news about the school in Rhode Island that had decided to fire all its teachers as part of its reform efforts, you’ve seen a glimpse of this tension between the big picture and the individual people. The latest news is that the administrators and teachers have negotiated an agreement and they will not be fired after all. My thoughts about the agreement itself are for another post, what I’m interested in here is the way the story plays out in the version I read at NPR.

You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the people in the story. The teachers are only present in the person of the union boss while the school district itself is represented by the Superintendents and a state administrator. They aren’t really “people” in my book but talking points who are saying all the right things about this agreement and the efforts they are making to improve education in their district. Even the Obama administration plays a role, but again, one that is preordained and peppered with words like “accountability” and “chronically underperforming.”

But there, in the last few sentences are the people: the parents and students who haven’t been involved in the agreement and yet who will be influenced by its outcomes.

The teachers largely have won the support of students and parents, many of whom believe the staff has been made a scapegoat for the woes of a high school in one of the state’s poorest cities. Norma Velez, whose 15-year-old son, Jose, is a sophomore, said she was pleased to see the teachers return. “When the teachers teach to students — some of them — they don’t want to cooperate with the teachers,” Velez said. “They just do what they want, and they hold up the rest of the students.” Julia Pickett, a 17-year-old senior, bristled at the description of the school as failing. “I don’t like that perception of us. I think we’re a great school,” she said. “Just one test score doesn’t determine whether a school is good or bad.”

Here’s that glimpse of the real people behind the “facts” of the story…the brief insight into the kinds of classrooms these teachers face each day. The momentarily glimmer of the idea that the human beings behind the numbers don’t see themselves as failures. And, in support of my own bias, the suggestion that teachers are not the only ones to blame but have been part of a wider failure of imagination throughout the education community that has developed simplistic, easy to evaluate definitions of student achievement and success. It does often get boiled down to a number–just one test score–and the human beings get lost.