Last week in this space I wondered why the President had singled out for high praise a school in Denver where the teachers had taken on their own union to get work rules relaxed. Was he, I asked, sending a not-very-subtle message to teacher unions, “Put kids’ interests first. Stop with the trade union behavior”?
I asked Peter Cunningham, the Department’s uber-capable Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach, how that particular school was selected. He responded in an email that he had had nothing to do with it.
So if it wasn’t the Department of Education, then who? The likely suspects are on the President’s White House staff or in the Office of Management and Budget. Perhaps someone is off the reservation.
Or perhaps a speechwriter didn’t perform due diligence. That happens.
Or maybe eager staffers who work for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (former Denver Superintendent of Schools) did their job—promoted their boss—effectively. (We saw the Senator and others from Colorado give their own standing ovation at that point in the speech.)
I wish the President had singled out a successful school that also models what many of us would like to see everywhere: teachers and their unions working with management to give kids maximum opportunities to learn. That would have been a great lesson for his audience, and it would have helped tamp down the teacher-bashing and teacher-union bashing. Instead, he added fuel to their fire, which is already hot and getting hotter, as more governors go after tenure and seniority.
But what matters more right now is what the Department and others are actually doing. Lots, it turns out. For instance, later this month the Department will host 150 school districts (in Denver!) for two days about ‘labor management collaboration.’ In the press release, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is quoted as saying, “Union leaders and administrators across the country are finding new ways to work together to focus on student success. The leaders from these 150 districts are committed to bold reforms and are showing the country what is possible when adults come together, particularly in tough times, to do the right thing for kids.”
This event is sponsored by the two teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the National School Boards Association, the American Association of School Administrators and the Council of the Great City Schools. That is, just about everyone.
The Ford Foundation is picking up this tab, according to the press release. Elsewhere, the Gates Foundation is putting serious dollars behind collaborative efforts in Hillsborough, Florida and other districts.
The skeptic in me wonders about two phrases the Secretary uses: ‘bold reforms’ and ‘student success.’ If by the latter he means higher test scores, this meeting won’t amount to much. If by ‘bold reforms,’ he means ‘turnaround specialists’ and other half-hearted changes, the meeting will probably be a waste of time.
I hope he (and Peter Cunningham) insist that everyone prepare for the meeting by reading or re-reading the two most recent surveys of teachers done by Met Life and Scholastic/Gates Foundation. Use those documents as the foundation, and something great could come out of these two days in February.
Stopping teacher bashing is not enough. Nor is “better communication” between labor and management. What’s needed is a proactive effort to make teaching a better job.
NB: “Better Job” does NOT mean shorter hours or higher pay, if you trust what the teachers themselves say. What they want, according to MetLife and Scholastic/Gates, are opportunities to collaborate, involvement in curriculum, trust and respect.
2011 SOTU address (photo NY Times) Was the President sending a strong message to teacher unions last night? Sure looks that way in the light of day.
What most of us saw and heard was high praise for education. He put it #2, behind ‘innovation’ on his list. Five of his 23 guests were students, and a 6th—Jill Biden—is a community college teacher. That’s all good. Mr. Obama praised “Race to the Top” and called for rewriting No Child Left Behind, and that’s all good too.
He went out of his way to praise teachers and remind us all that parents must do their job—turn off the TV, and engage with their children. That provided a welcome relief from all the teacher- bashing going on now.
And—icing on the cake–he made an eloquent plea to young people: become teachers!
Friends of public education had to be smiling and may still be today. The National School Boards Association and others have issued press releases full of praise, for example.
You may remember that he singled out one public school for high praise.
Here’s what he said:
Take a school like Bruce Randolph in Denver. Three years ago, it was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado; located on turf between two rival gangs. But last May, 97% of the seniors received their diploma. Most will be the first in their family to go to college. And after the first year of the school’s transformation, the principal who made it possible wiped away tears when a student said ‘Thank you, Mrs. Waters, for showing… that we are smart and we can make it.’ [The reference is to principal Kristin Waters.]
I confess that the significance of the President’s choice went right over my head, but Andy Rotherham didn’t miss it. He provided context on the NY Times blog. Here’s what Andy wrote:
The president singled-out a Denver school that was turned around only after its teachers took on their own union to get out from under the standard collective bargaining agreement. Needless to say that’s a strategy the two national teachers’ unions don’t want to see replicated around the country. I wrote about that episode on The Times’s Op-Ed page a few years ago. Michael Bennet, now a senator from Colorado, was the superintendent in Denver at the time and the move was controversial then and the idea remains contentious today. Of all the schools the president could have chosen to highlight, it’s a fascinating choice.
When teachers at two Denver public schools demanded more control over their work days, they ran into opposition from a seemingly odd place: their union. The teachers wanted to be able to make decisions about how time was used, hiring and even pay. But this ran afoul of the teachers’ contract. After a fight, last month the union backed down — but not before the episode put a spotlight on the biggest challenge and opportunity facing teachers’ unions today.
The high-poverty school was the first to petition for and be granted innovation status — an agreement by union teachers to waive certain district and union rules. The idea was to give teachers more time, money and other resources to work with struggling students. The school has been climbing in achievement over the years.
In its transformation, Bruce Randolph changed from being a straight middle school into a school serving grades 6-12. Its first class graduated last spring into the open arms of a tearful Waters.
Bruce Randolph had been on the list of schools to be closed. Today it’s not the slam-dunk success that the President implied. It’s still on the ‘watch list’ and ranks 66th out of about 150 schools in Denver, but it clearly has improved dramatically.
But the story is not how much the school has improved; it’s how. Union rules were in the way, and so teachers took on their union. With the support of the superintendent, they forced union leadership to back off.
It seems pretty clear that last night the President was firing another shot across the union bow, much as he did last year when he sided with a Rhode Island school board that fired its high school teachers when they wouldn’t go along with a reasonable ‘restructuring’ plan.
“Stop with the trade union stuff,” the President was saying. “Start putting the interests of students first.”
Unions don’t seem to have much choice in the matter, given the outpouring of anti-union and anti-teacher rhetoric and actions in New Jersey, Alabama, Wyoming and just about any state you can name. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two unions, seems to get it, but she has to persuade her mostly urban locals to move. The far larger National Education Association hasn’t shown any signs that I have seen that it recognizes that the ground has shifted, dramatically and probably permanently.
Teacher bashing is all the rage these days, unfortunately.
Teachers are leaving the profession, and I am hearing from teachers I trust that the exodus would be greater if the economy were better. While I think that aspects of the profession ought to be criticized, particularly the ‘trade union’ mentality of some—but not all—union leaders, the bashing is way out of line.
I write about this in my forthcoming book, The Influence of Teachers, but here today I am simply presenting the words from one veteran teacher, a woman I know to be dedicated to her students and the profession.
Please read and reflect.
I teach in a public high school whose students reflect the full socio-economic range of our county. But rich or poor and regardless of the educational backgrounds of their parents, many of my students seem to need me to parent them as well as teach them.
On any given day, in order to teach I must also address the results of this kind of parenting:
–The gay teen whose mother tells him she wishes he had never been born and refuses to come get him when he cuts himself in the school bathroom;
–The-15-year-old whose smell makes us wretch because his clothes aren’t washed and he doesn’t bathe regularly;
–The 15-year-old girl who is shoved through a pane glass window by her mother’s boyfriend when she asks him not to smoke around his new infant daughter (her half sister);
–The affluent boy whose parents’ acrimonious divorce (his father’s 3rd) forces him to quit the tennis team this spring because the shared custody arrangement (alternating homes nightly) leaves no way for him to get home from school after practices and games;
–The mother who corners me in the parking lot at Safeway to challenge a grade on her son’s paper, saying it’s because he rushed that he didn’t clean up the evidence of plagiarism in his essay, and I have to re-grade the paper because his IEP entitles him to extended time (the plagiarism itself didn’t trouble her);
–The 14-year-old boy who cannot stay awake in class because he is out until after midnight most school nights; his mother says, “he doesn’t listen to me,” and add that, in her opinion, he’s “too old to have a bedtime;”
–The mother who tells me to stop calling her about her child’s behavior and says, “When she’s at school she’s your problem. Stop expecting me to do your job.”
–The phone that does not ring when report cards and interims go home showing failing grades.
–The father who berates me for chastising his daughter (who has 3 Es and 2 Ds) when I find her hanging out with her friends in the hallway rather than participating in an optional after-school Exam Review session which the teacher is running voluntarily and on his own time.
I am not alone. Many teachers feel like punching bags and crash test dummies.
Now, dear reader, ask yourself: would you trade places with that teacher? Could you last in the job as long as she had and still be as effective and caring as she is? Does she have a right to be upset?
For reasons I don’t understand, many powerful people are defining public education’s problem as “Bad Teachers.” That’s simplistic and dangerous.
Your thoughts on what we can do to make things better?
‘Silence is Golden,’ we are told, but sometimes it’s just yellow.
-Kerry Kennedy, RFK Center for Human Rights
While it’s a cliché that democracy is not a spectator sport, the unfortunate reality is that our schools are not preparing students to be actively engaged, responsible citizens. Education has a public purpose: to enable citizens to use their full intellectual and emotional potential to live as productive, interactive members of a community. Shouldn’t schools prepare students for the deliberative processes that democracy requires, including collaborative, informed action? And democracy is not a spectator sport.
“Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5000 years,” wrote the great educator W.E.B DuBois in 1949, “the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental … The freedom to learn … has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said.”
DuBois recognized the fundamental importance of learning to question. What would DuBois write today, one wonders, about No Child Left Behind or our national obsession with machine-scored multiple-choice tests?
Even if educators agree that preparing for life in a democratic society requires learning about, debating and making decisions about controversial issues, they often cannot follow through in classrooms because of an unstated public “understanding” that schools should avoid controversy. However, young people connect to controversial topics immediately and on a daily basis, and by denying this reality, schools make themselves irrelevant at precisely the time that youth need guidance.
For a host of reasons, schools and teachers have not made the connections between teaching democratic citizenship and the new technological universe. They tend instead to be reactive, preferring to avoid controversy and possible litigation. Where the “safe road” eventually leads ought to be of concern to everyone.
It’s often said that teachers “teach the way they were taught, not the way they were told to teach.” What if young people grow up to practice citizenship the way they are treated in schools, which are both hierarchical and authoritarian? Schools deliver an overtly knowledge-based curriculum, but the “hidden curriculum” prizes control and order over inquiry and learning. Stated simply, schools and teachers do not typically like to pose questions they don’t already know the answers to – and what kind of preparation is that for effective citizenship in a democracy?
Notions of citizenship based on inquiry and active learning will not take root simply because some new technologies are available. But what these new technologies do, much more readily than our schools, is lend themselves to inquiry. Why? Because nearly any question can be answered – or at least explored in depth – through technological inquiry. Because they encourage questioning, the new technologies are a threat to the status quo (and should therefore be encouraged by all who want to see our youth engaged in the larger society).
A few years ago the schools in one Virginia county proclaimed, “We recognize the importance of teaching children appropriate ways in which to work with others in classrooms, workplace and community.” The district created a citizenship-building “Word of the Month,” which it posted on the district’s website. This was the message about patience:
At home, as well as at school, exercising patience is a good way to avoid conflicts with brothers, sisters, and classmates. Sometimes self-control is a key ingredient of patience, for example, “holding your tongue” when someone says something you think is “dumb.” Waiting your turn is another way of showing patience, whether you are standing in line at the water fountain, raising your hand to speak in class, or waiting your turn to receive dessert at the dinner table at home.
There is, however, no mention of the value of occasionally being impatient – with cruelty, intolerance, racism, sexism and cyberbullying for example.
And conflict, the passage suggests, is inherently bad. Am I the only one who finds a deeper message, an endorsement of docility?
Another example: When ninth-graders in upscale Hanover High School, N.H., wanted to start a debate team, not one teacher was willing to serve as faculty advisor. When the kids finally did persuade a teacher to serve and debates began, they all found themselves in big trouble – because the students were debating abortion rights, drug abuse and other controversial topics. The adults in charge were apparently so frightened by the idea of students talking openly about complex concepts such as these that they shut down the organized discussion. Perhaps they hoped that if ignored, complexity would just go away.
I asked a tenured high school veteran teacher what he does when a student tries to talk with him about a potentially controversial issue. Does he always try to avoid tough issues?
“I won’t say I always succeed, but I try to,” he said, laughing nervously. He agreed that he was teaching a value lesson right there but defended his position. “I have to be very, very careful because I could be sued. A parent could take me to task on this. I try not to interfere with what the parent is trying to pass on to their children, and I don’t find that cowardly at all.”
Fear of ideas, fear of conflict, and blind obedience – that’s one heck of a lesson to teach students. But don’t be too quick to blame the teacher, who’s only behaving sensibly, given everyone’s fear these days of inflaming passions.
Unfortunately, children who are taught to be afraid of ideas stand a good chance of growing up to be ignorant, easily led adults. I hope that older students recognize the “retreat from controversy” approach to education for what it is – and hold it in contempt.
When is silence golden, and when is it just plain yellow? Teachers ought to be questioning and teaching students to question. ‘How do you know what you know?’ How do you know that is true?’ ‘Is there evidence that contradicts your view?’ In short, how do we know what we know?
Media, in its many forms, can provide an alternate source of democracy and be a democratizing influence. If embraced by proactive public educators, media (particularly the Internet) can be a “walled garden,” allowing students to embark on educational journeys that could not even have been imagined 15 years ago – even as responsible adults are protecting the young from the very real dangers of unlimited access.
However, if schools are to benefit from the opportunities that media and technology provide, significant changes must first occur. Schools, and the adults in them, must become less reactive and controlling, and more open to learning and changing. They must embrace media in its many forms, because, to truly advance student learning and form the democratic habits of thoughtfulness and reflection, teachers must first become learners.
The technology can allow educators to more efficiently convey the body of accepted knowledge, and that’s fine. But it can also allow students to take greater control over their learning. They can be in the driver’s seat (the way they are often going to be once they leave school.)
Whether public schools, long accustomed to a largely custodial role and now under harsh attack, can make these changes is questionable. Our future as a healthy democracy may hang in the balance.
When the Constitutional Convention ended in 1787, and as our founding fathers exited Independence Hall with the Constitution they had worked so long and hard to draft, a woman named Mrs. Powell approached Benjamin Franklin.
“Well, Doctor,” she asked, “What have we got – a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” Mr. Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
Can we keep it? With the public school education our children are receiving today, can we have enough well-informed, engaged, civic-minded citizens to actively and intelligently participate in our democracy and keep it strong and vital? I think we may find out the answer to that question sooner than we expect.
“If I could change one thing, I would get rid of tenure.” – Larry Rosenstock, founder of High Tech High and winner of the 2010 McGraw Prize in Education, at a public forum, September 2010
“So would I.” – Stephen McMahon, President of San Jose (CA) Teachers Union, in response.
“I could care less about tenure.” – Dal Lawrence, former president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, in an interview, November 2010
“I have started using the words ‘due process’ myself. I think ‘tenure’ is a loaded word.” – Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, in an email, November 2010
What on earth is going on here? Is the question of tenure actually up for debate and discussion? If so, it’s long overdue. And is it possible that teacher unions will take the initiative?
Teacher tenure is closely connected to the flawed evaluation process. After all, an evaluation system–like the current one–that finds 97 percent of teachers to be ‘satisfactory’ or better will have no trouble handing out lifetime jobs.
“Tenure should be a significant and consequential milestone in a teacher’s career,” notes the National Council on Teacher Quality. “Unfortunately, the awarding of tenure occurs virtually automatically in just about all states, with little deliberation or consideration of evidence of teacher performance. Teacher effectiveness in the classroom, rather than years of experience, should be the preponderant criterion in tenure decisions.”
In the current system, most public school teachers gain tenure, generally speaking a lifetime job, after just three years of teaching. In eight states, including California and Maryland, tenure is granted after two years. Hawaii and Mississippi offer tenure after just one year, and our nation’s capital requires no set amount of teaching performance before granting tenure. In other words, many school administrators are forced to make this critical and lasting decision halfway through a teacher’s first or second year in the classroom.
That’s changing. Several state legislatures may pass laws that eliminate teacher tenure. The New York City school administration has just acted to make attaining tenure more difficult, by requiring principals to do more than check off a box or two (the old way). New York has a problem: In the last school year, only 234 teachers out of the nearly 6,400 who were eligible for tenure were denied it; that’s 3.7 percent. It was even easier four years earlier, when only 0.4 percent of those eligible were denied tenure. Under the new rules, principals must now consider a teacher’s contributions in and out of the classroom and his students’ performance on standardized tests.
What’s the right course of action? Get rid of tenure while maintaining due process protections? Make it more difficult to achieve? Or perhaps have term contracts for five or ten years at a clip?
I have an opinion on this but would like to hear yours first.
Television and video have an undistinguished track record in public education, as either a baby sitter or a security measure. But things have changed in recent years, and the future is certainly getting interesting.
I cannot begin to count the number of times I have seen darkened classrooms full of kids watching some video or other. Sometimes it seemed to be relevant; other times it was clearly filler, an uninspired teacher killing time or ‘rewarding’ his students by letting them watch a movie.
Of course, some teachers have used video brilliantly to bring to life what otherwise might be words on a page. Far better to experience, say, Olivier’s Hamlet on the screen while also reading the play. (When I was a high school English teacher in the late 60’s, I used some wonderful Caedmon LP’s of Shakespeare’s play to bring Macbeth’s power and passion to life.)
Lots of schools use video cameras for security purposes. I’ve been in schools where every hallway is wired and someone sits in the main office watching multiple screens. Creepy. Other reporters tell me about schools where classrooms have cameras, allowing the principal to monitor activity.
However, in recent years we’ve seen videos of teachers losing it in class, thanks to hidden cameras or cell phones.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some teachers were now turning the tables, whipping out their cell phones to video kids who are misbehaving.
But this use is negative to the max and reflects how unhealthy the atmosphere is in some schools. Continue reading →
Every day seems to bring more interesting news in the world of public education: a new alliance of school districts and charters schools, scores on PISA, a waiver from the state department of education to allow Cathy Black to succeed Joel Klein in New York City, a front page story in the New York Times about Bill Gates’ support for videotaping teachers and Michelle Rhee’s launch of Students First.
Perhaps all of these developments deserve our attention, even though none can claim impact—they’re all works in progress, even the semi-good news about small increases by US students on the international PISA results. I expect to be blogging about them down the road.
If you are looking for positive impact on the lives and learning of children, I suggest the Coalition of Essential Schools, that wonderfully loose organization created in 1984 by the late Ted Sizer, a true giant in education.
Whether it’s the network of like-minded teachers who have been supporting each other for years and years, sharing ideas, techniques, successes and failures, or wildly successful schools like High Tech High and the Met schools, it’s clear that CES has had a positive impact on our schools. The CES common principles are found in most of the good work that is going on for kids today in schools all around the nation. Continue reading →
We have 15 million high school students, but about 1 million drop out every year. That’s nearly 7%! This means that approximately 1 out of every 4 9th graders won’t graduate high school.
Today’s report from America’s Promise, “Building a Grad Nation,” indicates that some progress has been made, but not enough. The report, made possible by Target, calls for a domestic Marshall Plan to address the problem.
I had strong reactions to five points in the report. And if you are too busy to read them all, please skip to #5.
#1: Credit card companies can track us anywhere, anytime, but schools don’t have a clue about where their students end up, because states and schools don’t count graduates and dropouts the same way. We do have a common measure—but, the report notes, “The federal government will require the states to use this calculation for the 2010-2011 school year and be held accountable for their progress based on this calculation for the 2011-2012 school year.”
Somehow this Thanksgiving seems more like Halloween, full of tricks and treats.
#1. The big treat was, of course, Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times, telling the world that, if he were starting out in journalism today, he would be an education reporter. He’s right. It’s a happening beat.
#2. This next one is either a trick or a treat, depending on where you are sitting: Bill Gates continues to speak out, leading some to label him ‘the shadow Secretary of Education. This time he chose the annual meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers in Louisville to call for huge changes in how teachers are paid. He said that the ‘bonus’ for having a Master’s degree was a waste of money (lots of money too, an estimated $8.6 billion in extra pay), because there’s little evidence that extra degrees add to positive student outcomes. There’s a mighty wind blowing on the issue of teacher pay. Continue reading →
I have a new favorite film about education. This one is NOT about school but rather about the moral dilemmas we all face, in this case a matter of life and death.
Where Do I Stand?captures the reactions of seven young people living in South Africa during the xenophobia attacks of 2008 in which 62 foreigners were murdered and about 100,000 driven out of their homes.
Today’s report from America’s Promise, “
#2. This next one is either a trick or a treat, depending on where you are sitting: 
The Merrow Report 