From the Washinton Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
At a time when Wisconsin teachers are protesting to keep their collective bargaining rights, President Obama is traveling to Florida to share a stage with former governor Jeb Bush, the king of corporate-driven, standardized test-obsessed school reform that devalues teachers and their unions.
What a tag team.
Obama is scheduled to speak to the students and faculty of Miami Central Senior High about the importance of out-educating the competition to secure America’s future. (That’s highly unlikely, with states cutting billions of dollars out of school budgets and with a reform agenda that is focused on expanding charter schools, assessing teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and the like, but never mind.)
Obama is appearing in Florida as state legislators move toward passing legislation (Senate Bill 736, HB 7019) that:
* Ties at least half of a teacher’s salary to how well his/her students perform on standardized tests
* Prevents consideration of many advanced degrees and special training to be considered in determining a teacher’s salary
* Eliminates tenure for teachers hired after the summer of 2014
* Requires the creation of new standardized assessments for all courses, though it doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to pay.
Similar legislation passed last year but was vetoed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist. The new governor, Rick Scott, not only supports the legislation but had dangled the idea of taking apart the way public education is financed in Florida and handing money over to all parents in a new “voucher” system that would have made it virtually impossible to maintain local public schools. Scott has put that idea aside for now.
Obama has gone out of his way to be bipartisan in the education reform arena, which would be good if the Republicans were right about reform, but they aren’t either. Rather than eliminate the most egregious parts of No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of Jeb Bush’s brother, former president George W. Bush, Obama is building on some of them, making them even worse.
For example, instead of using standardized test scores to evaluate only schools and students, they now will be linked to how much a teacher is paid (even though we all know that a teacher isn’t solely responsible for how well a kid does on a test). It’s a bad idea, not championed by assessment experts and not borne out by research, but it’s the reform idea du jour, backed by Gates Foundation money and Obama’s policy agenda.
Breaking bread with Jeb Bush on school reform should be a questionable proposition for a president from a party that has traditionally championed public education (which is not to say it doesn’t need reform) and teachers unions (which is not to say that they should not reform).
Florida is increasingly being looked to as a national model of education reform, and we have Jeb Bush to thank for that. The state began to overhaul its public education system after Jeb Bush became governor in 1999, and it has been a leader in reforms centered around standardized tests, the expansion of charter schools, virtual education and merit pay. He long tried to reduce the power of teachers unions -- being very vocal about his aims -- and last year campaigned for legislation that would eliminate teacher tenure.
Under Bush, the state did make progress early on by focusing on reading and creating a statewide reading research center while hiring reading coaches.
The biggest improvement in Florida’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, were in elementary reading, which suggests that this focus worked. The achievement gap for different demographic groups between 1998 and 2009 also shrunk for fourth- and eighth-grade reading between students who were in the federal lunch program (low-income families qualify) and those who do not qualify, according to a post by Florida educator Sherman Dorn.
But the achievement gap didn’t budge for 8th-grade writing or for math in any grade. Here’s the main point: Bush doesn’t talk about his reading initiative when he talks about his success, instead crediting his standardized testing regime.
The scheduled Obama-Jeb Bush fest is symbolic of how far afield Democrats have gone with school reform.
Obama last month expressed support for the Wisconsin teachers, who have been protesting to keep the collective bargaining rights (and that of other public employees) that the governor, Scott Walker, is intent on taking away. Wisconsin teachers already made concessions on monetary issues.
Obama said: "Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally seems like more of an assault on unions. And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers.”
So, at this point in time, when teachers in Wisconsin and elsewhere feel besieged, I’m wondering why Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are flying to Florida to be with Republicans who have been part of the attack force. Why, when teachers are fighting for union rights, does the president decide to spend time with anti-teachers union school reformers?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/obamas-questionable-trip-to-mi.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education reform. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
The false claims of education reform
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Paul Thomas
"Accountability," "merit," "choice," and "competition" are compelling to most Americans because they speak to our faith in rugged individualism.
As South Carolina faces yet another year of budget shortfalls that jeopardize many aspects of the state budget—notably education—we must look especially close at new policies and proposals that are driven by ideology but not supported by evidence. Two ideas being considered now that deserve our skepticism are merit-based teacher pay and increased funding for charter schools.
From President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan to the misleading documentary "Waiting for Superman" to the new reformers (Bill Gates, Geoffrey Canada, and Michelle Rhee), the public is bombarded by a false claim that teacher quality is the most important element in student learning and public education is failing because of an inordinate number of "bad" teachers.
Evidence, however, shows that teacher and school quality accounts for only about 10-20% of measurable student achievement and that out-of-school factors are the dominant source of education problems.
Yet, teachers do matter, often in ways that cannot be measured, and since teacher pay accounts for the greatest percentage of education budgets — which continue to dominate state budgets — political leaders and the public feel compelled to call for greater teacher accountability.
Reformers such as Gates and Canada have been beating the drum for teacher accountability and weeding out the claimed "bad" teachers, and this media-driven mantra is turning many states to consider dropping traditional teacher pay scales based on experience and degrees for merit-based systems that are linked to claimed objective data, such as test scores.
Again, "accountability" and "merit" are compelling concepts, especially when we are talking about adults who are charged with educating our children. But merit-based teacher pay should be rejected for the following reasons:
• Studies show value-added methods (a popular form of merit pay) to be statistically flawed as tools of assessing a teacher's impact on student learning. In short, research refutes the effectiveness or accuracy of merit-based teacher pay.
• Teaching and learning are not singular and direct relationships between one teacher and one student. Any measure of student learning is a reflection of that child's entire life and entire education experience (including all teachers and learning experiences in that child's life). The impact of one teacher on one student, in fact, can be hard to measure for many years.
• To identify a direct and thus causational relationship between teachers and students, all other factors impacting student achievement, including out-of-school factors, would have to be controlled, resulting in a process that would cost more money and time than the state can fund.
• Decades of research show that teachers are not motivated by merit pay. Teachers are motivated by better teaching conditions, administrative and parental support, and collegiality.
• Accountability must be connected to autonomy and to the behavior of the person being held accountable. Currently, teachers are mandated to implement standards that they did not create, and their students are assessed by tests that those teachers did not design. To hold a person accountable without honoring that person's professional autonomy is unethical and invalid. And to hold one person (the teacher) accountable for the actions of another person (the student) is just as unethical.
If we believe teacher pay should be tied to merit and accountability, we must first honor teacher autonomy, and then design a system that addresses teacher behaviors—not student outcomes.
Charter schools appear to offer the choice and competition—which we have idealized—we believe can raise the quality of education, but increasing funding of charter schools proves to be as flawed as teacher merit pay.
The overwhelming body of evidence on charter schools shows that they are essentially the same as public schools. Also problematic is the inequity common in charter schools:
"The analysis found that, as compared with the public school district in which the charter school resided, the charter schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language. While charter schools have rapidly grown, the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007," reveals a review from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder (NEPC).
Another review from NEPC cautions: "Federal policies that will strengthen charter schools in the longer run—rather than expanding the number of charter schools in the short run—need to be based on a more accurate and representative body of evidence." SC would do well to delay expanding charter support, especially in a difficult budget year.
The teacher merit pay and charter school movements are being driven by false claims, clearly refuted by the weight of evidence. SC's political leaders must be careful not to be swayed by our ideologies and to seek policies and funding that serve our students well.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/accountability/the-2-false-claims-that-drive.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Paul Thomas
"Accountability," "merit," "choice," and "competition" are compelling to most Americans because they speak to our faith in rugged individualism.
As South Carolina faces yet another year of budget shortfalls that jeopardize many aspects of the state budget—notably education—we must look especially close at new policies and proposals that are driven by ideology but not supported by evidence. Two ideas being considered now that deserve our skepticism are merit-based teacher pay and increased funding for charter schools.
From President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan to the misleading documentary "Waiting for Superman" to the new reformers (Bill Gates, Geoffrey Canada, and Michelle Rhee), the public is bombarded by a false claim that teacher quality is the most important element in student learning and public education is failing because of an inordinate number of "bad" teachers.
Evidence, however, shows that teacher and school quality accounts for only about 10-20% of measurable student achievement and that out-of-school factors are the dominant source of education problems.
Yet, teachers do matter, often in ways that cannot be measured, and since teacher pay accounts for the greatest percentage of education budgets — which continue to dominate state budgets — political leaders and the public feel compelled to call for greater teacher accountability.
Reformers such as Gates and Canada have been beating the drum for teacher accountability and weeding out the claimed "bad" teachers, and this media-driven mantra is turning many states to consider dropping traditional teacher pay scales based on experience and degrees for merit-based systems that are linked to claimed objective data, such as test scores.
Again, "accountability" and "merit" are compelling concepts, especially when we are talking about adults who are charged with educating our children. But merit-based teacher pay should be rejected for the following reasons:
• Studies show value-added methods (a popular form of merit pay) to be statistically flawed as tools of assessing a teacher's impact on student learning. In short, research refutes the effectiveness or accuracy of merit-based teacher pay.
• Teaching and learning are not singular and direct relationships between one teacher and one student. Any measure of student learning is a reflection of that child's entire life and entire education experience (including all teachers and learning experiences in that child's life). The impact of one teacher on one student, in fact, can be hard to measure for many years.
• To identify a direct and thus causational relationship between teachers and students, all other factors impacting student achievement, including out-of-school factors, would have to be controlled, resulting in a process that would cost more money and time than the state can fund.
• Decades of research show that teachers are not motivated by merit pay. Teachers are motivated by better teaching conditions, administrative and parental support, and collegiality.
• Accountability must be connected to autonomy and to the behavior of the person being held accountable. Currently, teachers are mandated to implement standards that they did not create, and their students are assessed by tests that those teachers did not design. To hold a person accountable without honoring that person's professional autonomy is unethical and invalid. And to hold one person (the teacher) accountable for the actions of another person (the student) is just as unethical.
If we believe teacher pay should be tied to merit and accountability, we must first honor teacher autonomy, and then design a system that addresses teacher behaviors—not student outcomes.
Charter schools appear to offer the choice and competition—which we have idealized—we believe can raise the quality of education, but increasing funding of charter schools proves to be as flawed as teacher merit pay.
The overwhelming body of evidence on charter schools shows that they are essentially the same as public schools. Also problematic is the inequity common in charter schools:
"The analysis found that, as compared with the public school district in which the charter school resided, the charter schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language. While charter schools have rapidly grown, the strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007," reveals a review from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder (NEPC).
Another review from NEPC cautions: "Federal policies that will strengthen charter schools in the longer run—rather than expanding the number of charter schools in the short run—need to be based on a more accurate and representative body of evidence." SC would do well to delay expanding charter support, especially in a difficult budget year.
The teacher merit pay and charter school movements are being driven by false claims, clearly refuted by the weight of evidence. SC's political leaders must be careful not to be swayed by our ideologies and to seek policies and funding that serve our students well.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/accountability/the-2-false-claims-that-drive.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Rhee starts push to get paid
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee likes to say that everything she does is for kids. But the first big campaign of her “Students First” organization, announced Wednesday, isn't really about them.
Rhee announced today what she is calling the national Save Great Teachers campaign.
What it’s not about: Giving great teachers what they say they want -- more support to do their jobs in school.
What it is about: Getting state legislatures to eliminate policies that require school districts, in the event of layoffs, to let the last-hired employees go first. This way, principals can supposedly save great young teachers and get rid of lousy older teachers.
Rhee’s intentions become transparent when one considers how to really protect great teachers: a reliable, valid, multi-part assessment system. If Rhee were so concerned about saving great teachers of any age, she would be more interested in immediately pursuing a valid assessment tool. If teachers were properly evaluated and those who don't belong in the classroom really removed, then the last-hired first-fired wouldn't be an issue, and the kids and adults would benefit.
Rhee did create a new teacher assessment system while she was D.C. schools chancelleor, called IMPACT, but after millions of dollars put into it, the system has been sharply criticized.
Among the problems cited about IMPACT are that it is highly punitive though provides little support for teachers, and that it relies on student standardized test scores, which research has shown are prone to error and ignore the fact that the quality of teaching isn’t the only factor that goes into how well a student performs on a single test. The system, unveiled in 2009, has undergone revisions though teachers still say it is unfair.
It is now common currency in school reform circles to blame teachers unions for pretty much everything wrong in schools, except for those things that can be laid at the steps of bad parents and lazy students. It doesn’t matter to people who want to union bash that the problems in schools are identical in states with unionized teachers and with non-unionized teachers, and that, perhaps, whatever one thinks about unions, the basic problems lie elsewhere.
It's tiring to hear the mantra “it’s for the kids,” or “students first” every time someone takes an anti-union step, but that any teacher who fights for his/her rights is only thinking about themselves and not the kids.
That is what is being said of the protesting teachers in Wisconsin by their critics, because they are fighting to keep their collective bargaining rights, which the Republican governor, Scott Walker, has vowed to eliminate.
Why shouldn’t the teachers protest? They already made monetary concessions and the governor still wants to strip them of the right to bargain in the future.
Why didn’t anybody say that plans just announced in Detroit to close half of the schools, a move that will create high school classes of about 60 students, is all about the adults and their failure to properly budget? Where is the concern for the kids here? Why isn’t someone figuring out how to protect the kids from humongous classes?
Maybe Michelle Rhee could have offered financial help to reduce class size in Detroit. Now THAT would be kid-friendly.
Meanwhile, the assault on teachers and their unions continues. As an example: In Amelia Island, Fla., last week, the Philanthropy Roundtable, a national association of individual donors, corporate giving officers, and foundation trustees and staff, held its annual conference and there was a session entitled “How to End Teacher Tenure.” That's what's on the minds of the rich folks who are dabbling in education policy with their millions.
It is true that over time teachers and their unions haven’t done themselves any great favors by saving the ultimate tool -- taking to the streets and shutting down schools -- to save their own collective bargaining rights.
How come teachers did not actively protest the imposition of a standardized testing dominated accountability system hen they knew that it would narrow curriculum and perpetuate invalid notions of success and failure?
It is safe to say that had they taken to the streets over No Child Left Behind, they would have been been accused of being obstructionist, lazy and afraid of being held accountable.
Oh wait. That happened anyway.
If they didn't loudly protest before over the shape of school reform as they should have, teachers are now worked up. Teachers and parents are planning a march on Washington July 28-31 in an effort to “organize and reclaim control of our schools.” That’s what the Save Our Schools March Web site says.
They can only hope that someone will be listening listening, and that they aren't too lat
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/rhees-new-initiative-not-all-a.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee likes to say that everything she does is for kids. But the first big campaign of her “Students First” organization, announced Wednesday, isn't really about them.
Rhee announced today what she is calling the national Save Great Teachers campaign.
What it’s not about: Giving great teachers what they say they want -- more support to do their jobs in school.
What it is about: Getting state legislatures to eliminate policies that require school districts, in the event of layoffs, to let the last-hired employees go first. This way, principals can supposedly save great young teachers and get rid of lousy older teachers.
Rhee’s intentions become transparent when one considers how to really protect great teachers: a reliable, valid, multi-part assessment system. If Rhee were so concerned about saving great teachers of any age, she would be more interested in immediately pursuing a valid assessment tool. If teachers were properly evaluated and those who don't belong in the classroom really removed, then the last-hired first-fired wouldn't be an issue, and the kids and adults would benefit.
Rhee did create a new teacher assessment system while she was D.C. schools chancelleor, called IMPACT, but after millions of dollars put into it, the system has been sharply criticized.
Among the problems cited about IMPACT are that it is highly punitive though provides little support for teachers, and that it relies on student standardized test scores, which research has shown are prone to error and ignore the fact that the quality of teaching isn’t the only factor that goes into how well a student performs on a single test. The system, unveiled in 2009, has undergone revisions though teachers still say it is unfair.
It is now common currency in school reform circles to blame teachers unions for pretty much everything wrong in schools, except for those things that can be laid at the steps of bad parents and lazy students. It doesn’t matter to people who want to union bash that the problems in schools are identical in states with unionized teachers and with non-unionized teachers, and that, perhaps, whatever one thinks about unions, the basic problems lie elsewhere.
It's tiring to hear the mantra “it’s for the kids,” or “students first” every time someone takes an anti-union step, but that any teacher who fights for his/her rights is only thinking about themselves and not the kids.
That is what is being said of the protesting teachers in Wisconsin by their critics, because they are fighting to keep their collective bargaining rights, which the Republican governor, Scott Walker, has vowed to eliminate.
Why shouldn’t the teachers protest? They already made monetary concessions and the governor still wants to strip them of the right to bargain in the future.
Why didn’t anybody say that plans just announced in Detroit to close half of the schools, a move that will create high school classes of about 60 students, is all about the adults and their failure to properly budget? Where is the concern for the kids here? Why isn’t someone figuring out how to protect the kids from humongous classes?
Maybe Michelle Rhee could have offered financial help to reduce class size in Detroit. Now THAT would be kid-friendly.
Meanwhile, the assault on teachers and their unions continues. As an example: In Amelia Island, Fla., last week, the Philanthropy Roundtable, a national association of individual donors, corporate giving officers, and foundation trustees and staff, held its annual conference and there was a session entitled “How to End Teacher Tenure.” That's what's on the minds of the rich folks who are dabbling in education policy with their millions.
It is true that over time teachers and their unions haven’t done themselves any great favors by saving the ultimate tool -- taking to the streets and shutting down schools -- to save their own collective bargaining rights.
How come teachers did not actively protest the imposition of a standardized testing dominated accountability system hen they knew that it would narrow curriculum and perpetuate invalid notions of success and failure?
It is safe to say that had they taken to the streets over No Child Left Behind, they would have been been accused of being obstructionist, lazy and afraid of being held accountable.
Oh wait. That happened anyway.
If they didn't loudly protest before over the shape of school reform as they should have, teachers are now worked up. Teachers and parents are planning a march on Washington July 28-31 in an effort to “organize and reclaim control of our schools.” That’s what the Save Our Schools March Web site says.
They can only hope that someone will be listening listening, and that they aren't too lat
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/rhees-new-initiative-not-all-a.html?wprss=answer-sheet
The David V Goliath battle for public schools
From the Huffington Post
by Rita M. Solnet
It wasn't just the type of slingshot or the shape of rock David used when he defeated Goliath. David's determination was steadfast, his belief system so strong, that it shaped his do or die mindset. David courageously pressed forward and defeated Goliath. But why did he win when others just as determined and just as brave do not?
This question seized my thoughts this weekend as I watched events unfold in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What helps you win when all the power and the money and legislative rule is stacked against you?
My search began. I discovered that despite the odds "Davids" win nearly one third of the time!
Two years ago, political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft studied every war fought in the past 200 years between strong and weak combatants. He analyzed cases where one side was as at least 10 times more powerful than the other and determined that Goliaths win 71 percent of the time. Under the circumstances, this was encouraging, but I still wondered what mystical quality the "Davids" possessed which enabled them to win against the odds?
When the underdogs acknowledged their weakness and employed unanticipated strategies, they won, according to Professor Arreguin-Toft. It wasn't just David's determination and fearlessness alone. David did the unexpected. Goliath laughed at the absurdity of David approaching him without armor. David unpredictably broke the rhythm of battle. He acted quickly with one rock and fortuitously lunged forward. He interrupted Goliath's pace. That's how David won.
Teachers were not expected to organize parents and students as allies and close down schools in Wisconsin; but, they did. Senators were not expected to leave the state to avoid a quorum; but, they did. The "Davids" are breaking the rhythm of this combat and atypically they're doing the unexpected. They are, in my opinion, on their way to winning this war!
I read articles last week detailing nearly a half dozen states who plan to launch legislative actions which will severely impact public education. With a spotlight beaming on the Wisconsin turmoil, I wondered if it would be days or weeks before Ohio, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois, Indiana would erupt similarly.
Seeking common ground and compromise is always my preference. But common sense does not appear to prevail in some states where egregious proposals are introduced to strip workers of bargaining rights and to drastically impact the stability of the teaching profession as well as reduce teachers' salaries. This is not a highly paid profession to begin with. I hasten to add, I am not a teacher.
Initiatives now disguised as "education reforms" are malignant attempts to gain increased power over unions. As I wrote two weeks ago on Huffington Post, "Who's Kidding Who With These Reforms," this fight does not belong in the classroom. Parents Across America www.ParentsAcrossAmerica.org are fed up watching this disaster unfold as children are sentenced to yet another year of reduced education funds, overcrowded classrooms, and a narrowed, unenriched curriculum due to riveting focus on a senseless standardized bubble test.
Methods concocted by lawmakers and policymakers today (non educators and non parents of public school children for the most part) are the opposite of what academically high performing countries employ. Finland, for example, is nearly 100 percent unionized. Finland strengthened their social welfare programs for children and families and invested in teachers decades ago. (Dr. Diane Ravitch's article, in December's Bridging Differences). That investment paid off. Teaching is a highly respected profession in Finland where only the best and the brightest with the highest credentials are chosen. I have yet to read where Finland chose to run weeks of anti-teacher promotions on film and tv networks and demoralize an entire profession incessantly. Nor does Finland set up competitive, non collegial environments by attaching teacher's salaries to student performance. But, I digress.
Parents will not allow their children to be the casualties in this war on unions. It is time for involved parents to react atypically as well. Children's futures are at stake. Visit, write, and phone your legislators, your school boards, your chancellors, your mayors, your governors to take this fight once and for all outside the classroom. Plead with them to stop using the education of our nation's children as leverage in their war with unions.
Parents have been disenfranchised in the effort to improve the quality of public education. As "Davids" ourselves, that is no longer acceptable. Parents are joining forces to break the rhythm of this war.
Our schools. Our children. Our voices.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-m-solnet/david-v-goliath-battle-ov_b_826281.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=uopx
by Rita M. Solnet
It wasn't just the type of slingshot or the shape of rock David used when he defeated Goliath. David's determination was steadfast, his belief system so strong, that it shaped his do or die mindset. David courageously pressed forward and defeated Goliath. But why did he win when others just as determined and just as brave do not?
This question seized my thoughts this weekend as I watched events unfold in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What helps you win when all the power and the money and legislative rule is stacked against you?
My search began. I discovered that despite the odds "Davids" win nearly one third of the time!
Two years ago, political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft studied every war fought in the past 200 years between strong and weak combatants. He analyzed cases where one side was as at least 10 times more powerful than the other and determined that Goliaths win 71 percent of the time. Under the circumstances, this was encouraging, but I still wondered what mystical quality the "Davids" possessed which enabled them to win against the odds?
When the underdogs acknowledged their weakness and employed unanticipated strategies, they won, according to Professor Arreguin-Toft. It wasn't just David's determination and fearlessness alone. David did the unexpected. Goliath laughed at the absurdity of David approaching him without armor. David unpredictably broke the rhythm of battle. He acted quickly with one rock and fortuitously lunged forward. He interrupted Goliath's pace. That's how David won.
Teachers were not expected to organize parents and students as allies and close down schools in Wisconsin; but, they did. Senators were not expected to leave the state to avoid a quorum; but, they did. The "Davids" are breaking the rhythm of this combat and atypically they're doing the unexpected. They are, in my opinion, on their way to winning this war!
I read articles last week detailing nearly a half dozen states who plan to launch legislative actions which will severely impact public education. With a spotlight beaming on the Wisconsin turmoil, I wondered if it would be days or weeks before Ohio, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois, Indiana would erupt similarly.
Seeking common ground and compromise is always my preference. But common sense does not appear to prevail in some states where egregious proposals are introduced to strip workers of bargaining rights and to drastically impact the stability of the teaching profession as well as reduce teachers' salaries. This is not a highly paid profession to begin with. I hasten to add, I am not a teacher.
Initiatives now disguised as "education reforms" are malignant attempts to gain increased power over unions. As I wrote two weeks ago on Huffington Post, "Who's Kidding Who With These Reforms," this fight does not belong in the classroom. Parents Across America www.ParentsAcrossAmerica.org are fed up watching this disaster unfold as children are sentenced to yet another year of reduced education funds, overcrowded classrooms, and a narrowed, unenriched curriculum due to riveting focus on a senseless standardized bubble test.
Methods concocted by lawmakers and policymakers today (non educators and non parents of public school children for the most part) are the opposite of what academically high performing countries employ. Finland, for example, is nearly 100 percent unionized. Finland strengthened their social welfare programs for children and families and invested in teachers decades ago. (Dr. Diane Ravitch's article, in December's Bridging Differences). That investment paid off. Teaching is a highly respected profession in Finland where only the best and the brightest with the highest credentials are chosen. I have yet to read where Finland chose to run weeks of anti-teacher promotions on film and tv networks and demoralize an entire profession incessantly. Nor does Finland set up competitive, non collegial environments by attaching teacher's salaries to student performance. But, I digress.
Parents will not allow their children to be the casualties in this war on unions. It is time for involved parents to react atypically as well. Children's futures are at stake. Visit, write, and phone your legislators, your school boards, your chancellors, your mayors, your governors to take this fight once and for all outside the classroom. Plead with them to stop using the education of our nation's children as leverage in their war with unions.
Parents have been disenfranchised in the effort to improve the quality of public education. As "Davids" ourselves, that is no longer acceptable. Parents are joining forces to break the rhythm of this war.
Our schools. Our children. Our voices.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-m-solnet/david-v-goliath-battle-ov_b_826281.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=uopx
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Are you there Mr. President?
From Education Week Teacher, Living in Dilogue
Peggy Robertson
When I was twelve I read a book that changed my life. It was titled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it again and again. In that book, I finally saw that someone out there understood me. Ultimately, we all desperately desire to be heard and understood. Expert teachers know this; they spend every waking moment trying to figure out what makes their students tick. We watch, we observe, we truly listen and we make changes based on our students' needs.
When I was in my twenties, and a new teacher, I read another book, The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. It rocked my world. It made me cry. The book came at a crucial time in my career as a teacher. I worked at a school "across the tracks," in a town in southern Missouri. My students were mainly African-American and many were very poor. I, like many new teachers today, got placed in a school with high need, high poverty students. It was the best job I ever had. Gloria was the voice in my head helping me along the way. She was my mentor but never knew it. She understood.
On February 17th, I attended a presentation by Diane Ravitch here in Denver, Colorado. I wanted to have her sign my copy of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but I honestly couldn't do it. I was feeling so emotional and I knew I might unravel. Diane hears me; my experience is simply an echo of the voices of many educators out there today. She knows what today's teachers are going through. If Diane and I did talk, she would understand what was beautiful about my fifteen years in the education field as well as what was haunting. She would know why I am debating whether I should return to the education field or not. She reports the facts accurately. She is our collective voice. She listens.
Are you there, President Obama? It's me, Peggy Robertson, the voice of a former teacher. Are you truly listening? I must say, with respect, that it does not feel as though you are. I have felt hopeless during your presidency. This week, for the first time, I have hope. Watching the public workers of Madison, Wisconsin protest and ask to be heard made me sit up a bit straighter. The American people have a voice! I saw democracy in action. But are you listening? I now hear that they are asking you to join them. I hope you do.
But this is about more than Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the first snowball. Once it starts rolling, it may be unstoppable. We've got a lot of mountains here in Colorado and I hope that snowball heads our way. The corporate education reform going on here is devastating.
My fifteen years as an educator were spent teaching in the elementary grades as well as supporting teachers and administrators in developing and refining effective instructional practices. During my five final years I suddenly became jaded. NCLB destroyed my spirit. I watched it's evil hand touch children, teachers, schools and districts.
I saw the strangle hold NCLB had on everyone. I tried to support teachers with all of the obstacles NCLB placed in our way. I watched Reading First fail. I saw principals come and go and schools get closed. I saw students caught in the crossfire. I saw the light go out in children's eyes when they were drilled continually for the state test. I worked with teachers who told me we needed to hurry up and help that child read (in kindergarten mind you) before a negative label was placed on that child; we were in a pressure cooker. I supported administrators in knowing what to look for when they observed and evaluated teachers; many of them did not know what they were seeing because they had not actually spent much time teaching. Or, they had spent time teaching subjects, such as Spanish, in a high school classroom and they were now being asked to evaluate elementary school teachers who were focusing on developing readers and writers. Such an irony - teachers evaluated by administrators who haven't taught what the teachers are teaching. The administrators were under immense pressure as they are today. The scores simply had to be good.
When I left the education profession I left angry. My beliefs about education had been trampled on. I didn't believe in what I was being required to do. Too much testing. Too many young children not being allowed to be children. Too much data being shoved down everybody's throats. I have stayed home the last four years with my youngest son, and I have watched the destruction of our American school system continue. My youngest child is ready to start school, and I wonder if I should re-enter the education profession. But, do I really want to enter the lion's den? I want to work in the education field again, but I also want to be heard and respected.
The current corporate reform taking over our public schools is handing us many more teachers, administrators and superintendents who will need immense support to do their jobs well. If the new administrators haven't taught, then how in the world can you expect them to evaluate teachers? How is a former army sergeant, now made superintendent, supposed to evaluate and support administrators? How is a teacher with five weeks training expected to support our neediest students? And, (lucky us) we have the Bush Institute training principals, in cooperation with Teach for America of course! It's insulting. All of it - it's a slap in the face to students, educators and parents.
It appears there is no point in getting a degree in education with the TFA program leading the way. And then we are told that our master's degrees are pointless too? I think about that every month when I pay my student loan bill. And this week, my eyes rolled back in my head when I heard that the U.S. Department of Education just gave fifty million dollars to the TFA program. The TFA program is a band-aid. And it hurts the neediest children when those teachers leave after their two-year contract has ended.
In your State of the Union Address you asked for more college students to go in to education. I'm sorry, but I seriously laughed when you said that. I would pay both my children money to stay out of the education field right now. It's a hostile environment. Teachers have to teach to the test. The new common core standards are developmentally inappropriate. Children get labeled as failures before they've even finished kindergarten thanks to the pressures of NCLB. And let's not forget that those five year olds don't get a nap or a recess or time for imaginative play. RTTT is punishing to teachers and to schools. Encourage my children to enter the lion's den to teach? No thank you. Your administration has shown no respect for educators, parents or students.
Are you listening Obama? The strangle hold of RTTT may result in the death of public education. Have you read Ravitch's book? Have you followed any of the research being shared on expert educator blogs across the country? What do you really know about TFAs? Merit pay? Value-added assessment? Standardized Testing?
News Flash - it's all bad. Why are you listening to Gates? What educational credentials does he have? It is so difficult to have a voice as a teacher. We don't have a lot of money so we can't buy the media, such as the new Media Bullpen, like Gates can. But we can march. And march we will. July 28th to July 31st concerned citizens will find their way to Washington D.C. to take part in the Save our Schools March and National Call to Action. Will you join us? Will you listen?
When I voted for you I voted with my heart and soul. I believed everything you said. I thought you heard me. I thought we had found a president that truly understood the needs of the American people. I don't believe that anymore. There has been too much damage done. We now have Arne Duncan (a non-educator) leading the way with the corporate reformers whispering in his ear. We have more testing, more teacher bashing and more children being hurt at the hands of corporate reform.
Are you there President Obama? Did you hear Stephen Krashen talk about poverty? Again and again? Did you hear that our international test scores are actually excellent when we look at the scores of the children not living in poverty? Do you really believe poverty has nothing to do with the woes of our public schools? Have you read the research? I could provide all the links but it doesn't seem necessary considering they are all over the internet on every single education blog I read. I don't think you are listening. I think it's going to take an uprising for you to hear us. Madison, Wisconsin, is speaking.
I am placing my faith in the American people. I am listening Madison, Wisconsin. I signed the letter. You are speaking for all of us. President Obama, please listen. Please renew the hope we all had when we elected you.
Peggy Robertson
Former Educator
Centennial, Colorado
Peggy Robertson taught kindergarten, first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She was hired by Richard C. Owen Publishers in 2001 to serve as a Learning Network Coordinator and spent the next three years training teacher leaders and administrators in educational theory and practice in the state of Colorado, as well as around the country during the summer months. In 2004 she was hired as the Literacy Coordinator by the Adams 50 School District in Westminster, Colorado. While working in Adams 50 she mentored teachers and administrators and supported them in the writing and implementation of school development plans.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/02/are_you_there_mr_president_mad.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d604596cdef1ba4%2C0
Peggy Robertson
When I was twelve I read a book that changed my life. It was titled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it again and again. In that book, I finally saw that someone out there understood me. Ultimately, we all desperately desire to be heard and understood. Expert teachers know this; they spend every waking moment trying to figure out what makes their students tick. We watch, we observe, we truly listen and we make changes based on our students' needs.
When I was in my twenties, and a new teacher, I read another book, The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. It rocked my world. It made me cry. The book came at a crucial time in my career as a teacher. I worked at a school "across the tracks," in a town in southern Missouri. My students were mainly African-American and many were very poor. I, like many new teachers today, got placed in a school with high need, high poverty students. It was the best job I ever had. Gloria was the voice in my head helping me along the way. She was my mentor but never knew it. She understood.
On February 17th, I attended a presentation by Diane Ravitch here in Denver, Colorado. I wanted to have her sign my copy of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but I honestly couldn't do it. I was feeling so emotional and I knew I might unravel. Diane hears me; my experience is simply an echo of the voices of many educators out there today. She knows what today's teachers are going through. If Diane and I did talk, she would understand what was beautiful about my fifteen years in the education field as well as what was haunting. She would know why I am debating whether I should return to the education field or not. She reports the facts accurately. She is our collective voice. She listens.
Are you there, President Obama? It's me, Peggy Robertson, the voice of a former teacher. Are you truly listening? I must say, with respect, that it does not feel as though you are. I have felt hopeless during your presidency. This week, for the first time, I have hope. Watching the public workers of Madison, Wisconsin protest and ask to be heard made me sit up a bit straighter. The American people have a voice! I saw democracy in action. But are you listening? I now hear that they are asking you to join them. I hope you do.
But this is about more than Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the first snowball. Once it starts rolling, it may be unstoppable. We've got a lot of mountains here in Colorado and I hope that snowball heads our way. The corporate education reform going on here is devastating.
My fifteen years as an educator were spent teaching in the elementary grades as well as supporting teachers and administrators in developing and refining effective instructional practices. During my five final years I suddenly became jaded. NCLB destroyed my spirit. I watched it's evil hand touch children, teachers, schools and districts.
I saw the strangle hold NCLB had on everyone. I tried to support teachers with all of the obstacles NCLB placed in our way. I watched Reading First fail. I saw principals come and go and schools get closed. I saw students caught in the crossfire. I saw the light go out in children's eyes when they were drilled continually for the state test. I worked with teachers who told me we needed to hurry up and help that child read (in kindergarten mind you) before a negative label was placed on that child; we were in a pressure cooker. I supported administrators in knowing what to look for when they observed and evaluated teachers; many of them did not know what they were seeing because they had not actually spent much time teaching. Or, they had spent time teaching subjects, such as Spanish, in a high school classroom and they were now being asked to evaluate elementary school teachers who were focusing on developing readers and writers. Such an irony - teachers evaluated by administrators who haven't taught what the teachers are teaching. The administrators were under immense pressure as they are today. The scores simply had to be good.
When I left the education profession I left angry. My beliefs about education had been trampled on. I didn't believe in what I was being required to do. Too much testing. Too many young children not being allowed to be children. Too much data being shoved down everybody's throats. I have stayed home the last four years with my youngest son, and I have watched the destruction of our American school system continue. My youngest child is ready to start school, and I wonder if I should re-enter the education profession. But, do I really want to enter the lion's den? I want to work in the education field again, but I also want to be heard and respected.
The current corporate reform taking over our public schools is handing us many more teachers, administrators and superintendents who will need immense support to do their jobs well. If the new administrators haven't taught, then how in the world can you expect them to evaluate teachers? How is a former army sergeant, now made superintendent, supposed to evaluate and support administrators? How is a teacher with five weeks training expected to support our neediest students? And, (lucky us) we have the Bush Institute training principals, in cooperation with Teach for America of course! It's insulting. All of it - it's a slap in the face to students, educators and parents.
It appears there is no point in getting a degree in education with the TFA program leading the way. And then we are told that our master's degrees are pointless too? I think about that every month when I pay my student loan bill. And this week, my eyes rolled back in my head when I heard that the U.S. Department of Education just gave fifty million dollars to the TFA program. The TFA program is a band-aid. And it hurts the neediest children when those teachers leave after their two-year contract has ended.
In your State of the Union Address you asked for more college students to go in to education. I'm sorry, but I seriously laughed when you said that. I would pay both my children money to stay out of the education field right now. It's a hostile environment. Teachers have to teach to the test. The new common core standards are developmentally inappropriate. Children get labeled as failures before they've even finished kindergarten thanks to the pressures of NCLB. And let's not forget that those five year olds don't get a nap or a recess or time for imaginative play. RTTT is punishing to teachers and to schools. Encourage my children to enter the lion's den to teach? No thank you. Your administration has shown no respect for educators, parents or students.
Are you listening Obama? The strangle hold of RTTT may result in the death of public education. Have you read Ravitch's book? Have you followed any of the research being shared on expert educator blogs across the country? What do you really know about TFAs? Merit pay? Value-added assessment? Standardized Testing?
News Flash - it's all bad. Why are you listening to Gates? What educational credentials does he have? It is so difficult to have a voice as a teacher. We don't have a lot of money so we can't buy the media, such as the new Media Bullpen, like Gates can. But we can march. And march we will. July 28th to July 31st concerned citizens will find their way to Washington D.C. to take part in the Save our Schools March and National Call to Action. Will you join us? Will you listen?
When I voted for you I voted with my heart and soul. I believed everything you said. I thought you heard me. I thought we had found a president that truly understood the needs of the American people. I don't believe that anymore. There has been too much damage done. We now have Arne Duncan (a non-educator) leading the way with the corporate reformers whispering in his ear. We have more testing, more teacher bashing and more children being hurt at the hands of corporate reform.
Are you there President Obama? Did you hear Stephen Krashen talk about poverty? Again and again? Did you hear that our international test scores are actually excellent when we look at the scores of the children not living in poverty? Do you really believe poverty has nothing to do with the woes of our public schools? Have you read the research? I could provide all the links but it doesn't seem necessary considering they are all over the internet on every single education blog I read. I don't think you are listening. I think it's going to take an uprising for you to hear us. Madison, Wisconsin, is speaking.
I am placing my faith in the American people. I am listening Madison, Wisconsin. I signed the letter. You are speaking for all of us. President Obama, please listen. Please renew the hope we all had when we elected you.
Peggy Robertson
Former Educator
Centennial, Colorado
Peggy Robertson taught kindergarten, first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She was hired by Richard C. Owen Publishers in 2001 to serve as a Learning Network Coordinator and spent the next three years training teacher leaders and administrators in educational theory and practice in the state of Colorado, as well as around the country during the summer months. In 2004 she was hired as the Literacy Coordinator by the Adams 50 School District in Westminster, Colorado. While working in Adams 50 she mentored teachers and administrators and supported them in the writing and implementation of school development plans.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/02/are_you_there_mr_president_mad.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d604596cdef1ba4%2C0
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Florida's education reforms questioned
From the MinnisotaPost.com
by Beth Hawkins
There are lots of great uses for data in education, many of them aimed squarely at helping to close the achievement gap. Data can help teachers identify which skills struggling students are missing, where their lesson plans need tweaking and — provided we ever got away from using data in punitive ways — to identify practices worthy of replicating.
You’d think, given the reams of data generated by all of the tests administered to the modern American schoolchild, that education policymakers might occasionally be able to point to a few objective, capital-T truths.
On Sunday, the Star Tribune carried a column by Katherine Kersten in which she suggested Minnesota look to Florida as a model for education reform. I admit I started reading mostly to find out whether Kersten would make it all the way to the end of the item without name-checking her erstwhile colleague, Cheri Pierson Yecke.
Kersten and Yecke both advocated various conservative education reforms as fellows at the Center for the American Experiment in the middle of the last decade, following the Minnesota Legislature’s failure to confirm Yecke as Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s education commissioner. Among the sticking points: Yecke’s belief that creationism had a place in Minnesota’s science standards.
Examples from Gov. Bush's era
In fact Kersten’s column did not mention Yecke, who served as Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education from 2005-2007, but she did toss out some impressive examples of progress made under the leadership of former Gov. Jeb Bush, who left office in 2007, on boosting test scores and closing the achievement gap.
“In 1998, almost half of all Florida fourth-graders were functionally illiterate,” Kersten reported. “Today, 72 percent can read.” She went on to detail impressive progress on narrowing the gap among African-American and Latino fourth-graders, who she reported now outperform their Minnesota counterparts.
“Since 2000, we’ve doled out about $4 billion in compensatory aid for low-income students and for ‘integration’ revenue,” she wrote of Minnesota. “We’ve got next to nothing in the way of academic improvement to show for it.”
Minnesota, she counseled, would do well to consider Florida’s bold reforms, which include an end to social promotion, a school-grading system, financial incentives for schools and teachers, alternative teacher certification and — wait for it — vouchers.
Florida and the achievement gap
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that Minnesota and lots of other states rate schools and have experimented with merit pay with mixed results, I was curious about Kersten’s argument that Florida, where racial and ethnic minorities make up the majority of students, was ahead of much of the nation in terms of closing the gap.
After all, as she put it, “Florida’s challenges dwarf ours.”
I wish I could tell you it took days of dogged sleuthing to pull the rug out from under her argument, but Jeb Bush’s campaign to spread the good word about his reforms throughout the country has already drawn criticism from a number of fact-checkers.
Since the late 1990s, Florida’s African-American and Latino fourth-graders have made impressive strides in closing the gap, particularly in reading. But at the eighth grade, the picture is decidedly mixed. According to Education Week, the state's math scores lag slightly behind national averages and are slightly ahead in reading.
It seems the impressive fourth-grade data can be credited to the same social-promotion policy Kersten cited as an effective reform. In 2002, Florida began holding back third-grade students who performed poorly on the state reading test, including 14 percent to 23 percent of Africa-Americans and Latinos.
“This policy of screening out the weakest readers, along with the presence of unknown numbers of older grade-repeaters in the grade four samples, changes the composition of the students tested in grade four and invalidates comparisons concerning student performance as a whole as well as results concerning ethnic group achievement gaps," Madhabi Chatterji of Columbia University’s Teachers College concluded in a report released last November.
“The evidence on Florida’s … achievement trends and gaps is mixed when other grade levels and subject areas are examined between 2002 and 2009,” the report noted. “A cursory review … shows that these gap patterns are neither consistent nor as impressive as one would think if one looked only at reading in grade four.”
Grad rates and college-entrance test scores
It gets worse. Florida's graduation rate and college-entrance test scores remain among the worst in the country. State officials put the graduation rate at 71 percent, while other assessments put it below 60 percent. Small wonder: In 2004 only 42 percent of Florida high-school students were taking upper-level math courses and only 27 percent were taking upper-level science courses.
The vouchers? Tossed out by the Florida Supreme Court in 2006. Bush subsequently tried to push two constitutional amendments through the Florida statehouse, but lawmakers rejected them.
Bush’s two Republican successors have, of course, gone on to promote their own reform agendas, with talk of merit pay, voucher-like educational choice funding schemes and challenges to teachers’ unions.
Charlie Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, pointed out that Florida’s school system has long been regarded as terrible. State leaders do deserve credit for instituting changes that sparked progress, and some of those changes probably hold lessons for Minnesota’s struggling schools. But Florida schools, he’s quick to add, still are not as good as Minnesota’s.
http://www.minnpost.com/learningcurve/2011/02/17/25870/floridas_touted_education_data_wither_under_scrutiny
by Beth Hawkins
There are lots of great uses for data in education, many of them aimed squarely at helping to close the achievement gap. Data can help teachers identify which skills struggling students are missing, where their lesson plans need tweaking and — provided we ever got away from using data in punitive ways — to identify practices worthy of replicating.
You’d think, given the reams of data generated by all of the tests administered to the modern American schoolchild, that education policymakers might occasionally be able to point to a few objective, capital-T truths.
On Sunday, the Star Tribune carried a column by Katherine Kersten in which she suggested Minnesota look to Florida as a model for education reform. I admit I started reading mostly to find out whether Kersten would make it all the way to the end of the item without name-checking her erstwhile colleague, Cheri Pierson Yecke.
Kersten and Yecke both advocated various conservative education reforms as fellows at the Center for the American Experiment in the middle of the last decade, following the Minnesota Legislature’s failure to confirm Yecke as Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s education commissioner. Among the sticking points: Yecke’s belief that creationism had a place in Minnesota’s science standards.
Examples from Gov. Bush's era
In fact Kersten’s column did not mention Yecke, who served as Florida’s chancellor of K-12 education from 2005-2007, but she did toss out some impressive examples of progress made under the leadership of former Gov. Jeb Bush, who left office in 2007, on boosting test scores and closing the achievement gap.
“In 1998, almost half of all Florida fourth-graders were functionally illiterate,” Kersten reported. “Today, 72 percent can read.” She went on to detail impressive progress on narrowing the gap among African-American and Latino fourth-graders, who she reported now outperform their Minnesota counterparts.
“Since 2000, we’ve doled out about $4 billion in compensatory aid for low-income students and for ‘integration’ revenue,” she wrote of Minnesota. “We’ve got next to nothing in the way of academic improvement to show for it.”
Minnesota, she counseled, would do well to consider Florida’s bold reforms, which include an end to social promotion, a school-grading system, financial incentives for schools and teachers, alternative teacher certification and — wait for it — vouchers.
Florida and the achievement gap
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that Minnesota and lots of other states rate schools and have experimented with merit pay with mixed results, I was curious about Kersten’s argument that Florida, where racial and ethnic minorities make up the majority of students, was ahead of much of the nation in terms of closing the gap.
After all, as she put it, “Florida’s challenges dwarf ours.”
I wish I could tell you it took days of dogged sleuthing to pull the rug out from under her argument, but Jeb Bush’s campaign to spread the good word about his reforms throughout the country has already drawn criticism from a number of fact-checkers.
Since the late 1990s, Florida’s African-American and Latino fourth-graders have made impressive strides in closing the gap, particularly in reading. But at the eighth grade, the picture is decidedly mixed. According to Education Week, the state's math scores lag slightly behind national averages and are slightly ahead in reading.
It seems the impressive fourth-grade data can be credited to the same social-promotion policy Kersten cited as an effective reform. In 2002, Florida began holding back third-grade students who performed poorly on the state reading test, including 14 percent to 23 percent of Africa-Americans and Latinos.
“This policy of screening out the weakest readers, along with the presence of unknown numbers of older grade-repeaters in the grade four samples, changes the composition of the students tested in grade four and invalidates comparisons concerning student performance as a whole as well as results concerning ethnic group achievement gaps," Madhabi Chatterji of Columbia University’s Teachers College concluded in a report released last November.
“The evidence on Florida’s … achievement trends and gaps is mixed when other grade levels and subject areas are examined between 2002 and 2009,” the report noted. “A cursory review … shows that these gap patterns are neither consistent nor as impressive as one would think if one looked only at reading in grade four.”
Grad rates and college-entrance test scores
It gets worse. Florida's graduation rate and college-entrance test scores remain among the worst in the country. State officials put the graduation rate at 71 percent, while other assessments put it below 60 percent. Small wonder: In 2004 only 42 percent of Florida high-school students were taking upper-level math courses and only 27 percent were taking upper-level science courses.
The vouchers? Tossed out by the Florida Supreme Court in 2006. Bush subsequently tried to push two constitutional amendments through the Florida statehouse, but lawmakers rejected them.
Bush’s two Republican successors have, of course, gone on to promote their own reform agendas, with talk of merit pay, voucher-like educational choice funding schemes and challenges to teachers’ unions.
Charlie Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, pointed out that Florida’s school system has long been regarded as terrible. State leaders do deserve credit for instituting changes that sparked progress, and some of those changes probably hold lessons for Minnesota’s struggling schools. But Florida schools, he’s quick to add, still are not as good as Minnesota’s.
http://www.minnpost.com/learningcurve/2011/02/17/25870/floridas_touted_education_data_wither_under_scrutiny
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Why I do not love public education
Another gret blog from Modern Schools. A lot of teachers have similar feelings about education. -cpg
Save Our Schools is hosting a Valentine’s Day blogging festival called I Love Public Education Blogging day. I’d like to participate, but I do not love public education. Here’s why:
I do love teaching and working with young people of all ages. Teaching is fun and inspiring, at least it was until the Ed Deformers really started to go crazy with accountability, testing, and attacking teacher compensation, tenure and pensions. I still learn a lot from my students and from my colleagues, which I really appreciate. I like the fact that education is free for all children, theoretically giving all kids the opportunity to grow and develop. Clearly, education is necessary so that people can learn the basic skills they need to survive in this world. It is also my livelihood, so I do not want to see it debased or eviscerated any further.
Herein lies the rub: Public Education has always existed as a tool for maintaining and enforcing the existing socioeconomic relations (i.e., ensuring that the rich remain rich and the rest of us have the minimal skills and attitude necessary to help them to do so). I do NOT love this most fundamental aspect of public education. The notion that education is the great equalizer is nothing but a liberal myth. It helps bolster the American Dream fantasy and it draws many do-gooder types to the teaching profession who make increasingly desperate sacrifices for “the good of our students,” and sometimes to the detriment of their colleagues. Yet the vast majority of people still end up in the same social class as adults as their parents, despite their schooling.
Certainly there is the potential for individual teachers to enlighten children and inspire them to resist the injustices in the world and to help some of them move up the social ladder, but even the very best teacher is fighting against tremendous odds. The fact is that the socioeconomic relations outside of school play a much stronger role in a child’s academic development than do the school or teacher. If we really want to see significant improvements in graduation rates and closing the achievement gap, then we need to be fighting for greater social and economic equity. We need to be organizing to take back the wealth that the rich have been sapping from us. We need stronger unions and higher pay for the 95% of Americans that are not part of the ruling elite. We need universal health care for all. We need childcare for all parents who want to work outside the home. We need mental health services and drug rehab for all who need it. We need affordable housing. We need to stop locking people up for nonviolent petty crimes like drug possession.
So for me, saving public education is about much more than just getting the billionaire (and millionaire) Ed Deformers off my back. Of course I would love to see an immediate end to NCLB and Race to the Top. It would be great if the voucher, charter-school and “choice” advocates would quit trying to raid public funds and even greater if we could start funding public schools generously instead of miserly. And it would be fantastic if we really did lower class sizes, provided adequate books and supplies, clean and well-maintained facilities. And while we’re at it, how about providing elementary teachers with a prep period or giving secondary teachers two or three prep periods so they had the time to really read all those essays and lab reports and to develop exciting new hands-on activities? How about providing full-time nurses and health clinics on campuses, reinstating counselors and librarians, arts and music? However, if we don’t also start organizing and fighting for some serious social transformations, even all these other great improvements will only help a fraction of our students to achieve at the high levels we have set for them.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-do-not-love-public-education.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Save Our Schools is hosting a Valentine’s Day blogging festival called I Love Public Education Blogging day. I’d like to participate, but I do not love public education. Here’s why:
I do love teaching and working with young people of all ages. Teaching is fun and inspiring, at least it was until the Ed Deformers really started to go crazy with accountability, testing, and attacking teacher compensation, tenure and pensions. I still learn a lot from my students and from my colleagues, which I really appreciate. I like the fact that education is free for all children, theoretically giving all kids the opportunity to grow and develop. Clearly, education is necessary so that people can learn the basic skills they need to survive in this world. It is also my livelihood, so I do not want to see it debased or eviscerated any further.
Herein lies the rub: Public Education has always existed as a tool for maintaining and enforcing the existing socioeconomic relations (i.e., ensuring that the rich remain rich and the rest of us have the minimal skills and attitude necessary to help them to do so). I do NOT love this most fundamental aspect of public education. The notion that education is the great equalizer is nothing but a liberal myth. It helps bolster the American Dream fantasy and it draws many do-gooder types to the teaching profession who make increasingly desperate sacrifices for “the good of our students,” and sometimes to the detriment of their colleagues. Yet the vast majority of people still end up in the same social class as adults as their parents, despite their schooling.
Certainly there is the potential for individual teachers to enlighten children and inspire them to resist the injustices in the world and to help some of them move up the social ladder, but even the very best teacher is fighting against tremendous odds. The fact is that the socioeconomic relations outside of school play a much stronger role in a child’s academic development than do the school or teacher. If we really want to see significant improvements in graduation rates and closing the achievement gap, then we need to be fighting for greater social and economic equity. We need to be organizing to take back the wealth that the rich have been sapping from us. We need stronger unions and higher pay for the 95% of Americans that are not part of the ruling elite. We need universal health care for all. We need childcare for all parents who want to work outside the home. We need mental health services and drug rehab for all who need it. We need affordable housing. We need to stop locking people up for nonviolent petty crimes like drug possession.
So for me, saving public education is about much more than just getting the billionaire (and millionaire) Ed Deformers off my back. Of course I would love to see an immediate end to NCLB and Race to the Top. It would be great if the voucher, charter-school and “choice” advocates would quit trying to raid public funds and even greater if we could start funding public schools generously instead of miserly. And it would be fantastic if we really did lower class sizes, provided adequate books and supplies, clean and well-maintained facilities. And while we’re at it, how about providing elementary teachers with a prep period or giving secondary teachers two or three prep periods so they had the time to really read all those essays and lab reports and to develop exciting new hands-on activities? How about providing full-time nurses and health clinics on campuses, reinstating counselors and librarians, arts and music? However, if we don’t also start organizing and fighting for some serious social transformations, even all these other great improvements will only help a fraction of our students to achieve at the high levels we have set for them.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-do-not-love-public-education.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Monday, February 14, 2011
Bashing Teachers and Public Schools comes from all sides
From the Washington Times Answer Sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Not sold on Rhee? You aren't the only one
From the St. Petersbug Times
by Jeffrey Solochek
Florida's lawmakers were starstruck.
Before them stood Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., public schools chancellor recently featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, on a Newsweek cover and in the documentary film Waiting for Superman.
"I am here today to ask you to keep being a leader," Rhee said, urging members of two education committees to tackle one the few reforms that Florida has yet to achieve: a streamlined way to get "ineffective" teachers out of the classroom. "There is so much more to do."
Senate Pre-K-12 Committee Chairman Steve Wise called her a movie star, and even Sen. Eleanor Sobel, a more skeptical Broward Democrat, gave a nod to Rhee for "bringing new energy to the education debate."
But as he watched from the audience, the spokesman from Florida's teachers union wondered why lawmakers were listening to her. "It's a little difficult to understand why she is given rock star status," said Mark Pudlow of the Florida Education Association.
Sure, Rhee might have the ear of the governor and the praise of the president. Sure, Rhee has made national headlines pushing through controversial measures relating to teacher tenure, evaluations and salaries in D.C.
But Pudlow noted that Washington, D.C., schools score at the bottom of the national Education Week Quality Counts ranking, while Florida rates close to the top. He observed that some of Rhee's controversial efforts to fire "ineffective" teachers have been overturned by an arbitrator after the Washington Teachers Union fought the effort tooth and nail.
Valid concerns, said Rhee, an unpaid, informal adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. She suggested looking through a different lens for some perspective.
"Over the three years that I was there, we saw really record gains in academic achievement on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) examination," she said. "We went from being last in the entire nation to leading the entire nation in gains in both reading and math at both the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. And we were the only jurisdiction in the entire country in which every single subgroup of children improved their academic standing."
The 75,000-student district still isn't the best, she acknowledged. Far from it, in fact. But Rhee proposed that the gains that D.C. schools made might be replicated if other school systems adopt some of the "drastic changes" that she pushed through.
Her new national organization, Students First, seeks to get states to adopt similar changes. Rhee has made presentations to leaders in New Jersey and Indiana about these efforts, and she headed to Atlanta right after her Tallahassee stop to make a pitch to Georgia lawmakers.
But she sees Florida as the logical leader for altering the teacher contract landscape, she said, because of its history of adopting school accountability measures and the willingness of its leaders to take on the tough challenges that lie ahead. She credited former Gov. Jeb Bush — whom she has met with — for starting the ball rolling, and current Gov. Scott for taking the next step.
Some of Rhee's points to Florida lawmakers last week:
• End the practice of relying on seniority to determine which teachers stay and go during layoffs.
• Reduce the length of time low-performing teachers get to improve, so children's education is not wasted.
• Separate teacher evaluations from the collective bargaining process.
• Eliminate "tenure" and related systems.
House Rep. K-20 competitiveness subcommittee Chairman Erik Fresen thanked Rhee for creating a national blueprint for education reform.
"We have to start treating teaching as a profession," Fresen said.
Some observers question whether Rhee's approach does that at all.
Rhee has endured much criticism for her tough approach to the issue, where she didn't always wait for everyone to join forces with her before forging ahead. Some have contrasted her with Hillsborough County superintendent MaryEllen Elia, who is attempting to change the face of teacher evaluation with the local teachers union on board.
Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today editorial writer who wrote the Rhee biography The Bee Eater, said Rhee made things happen in a district that hadn't moved much before her tenure. Her relentless push for teacher quality won devoted followers, he said, but also had its fallout.
"The pushback that sparked, especially around firing teachers, was the biggest reason Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid as mayor and Rhee had to step down," Whitmire said.
That's a lesson that Florida could draw from, Rhee said, acknowledging her own failure to communicate well with the public about her efforts.
"I didn't do as good a job as I needed to, to proactively go out to the great teachers and say, 'We're not talking about you. What I need you to do is stay. We want to recognize what you are doing. It's so important,' " she said. "You have to be careful not to send a message that you are blaming teachers or that you don't think teachers are good."
In fact, she said, teachers are critically important to the success of any effort to improve education. The strong ones want the weak ones out of their schools, Rhee related, and students deserve nothing less.
Wise stressed this point just before his committee passed its "teacher quality" bill on a unanimous, bipartisan vote.
"We are not here to punish teachers," Wise said, adding that he wants to hear from more teachers, as well as parents and others in order to improve the measure before it gets to a final vote.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said Florida lawmakers should think twice about heading down D.C.'s path. The full costs of Rhee's tenure have yet to be borne out, he said, but already they have begun to arise in the form of deficits and back pay for improperly fired teachers.
Boiled down, Saunders had one simple message for Florida lawmakers: "Florida should not be listening to Michelle Rhee."
Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at solochek@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4614. For more education news, visit the Gradebook at www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/not-everyones-sold-on-michelle-rhee-gov-scotts-education-adviser/1151311
by Jeffrey Solochek
Florida's lawmakers were starstruck.
Before them stood Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., public schools chancellor recently featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, on a Newsweek cover and in the documentary film Waiting for Superman.
"I am here today to ask you to keep being a leader," Rhee said, urging members of two education committees to tackle one the few reforms that Florida has yet to achieve: a streamlined way to get "ineffective" teachers out of the classroom. "There is so much more to do."
Senate Pre-K-12 Committee Chairman Steve Wise called her a movie star, and even Sen. Eleanor Sobel, a more skeptical Broward Democrat, gave a nod to Rhee for "bringing new energy to the education debate."
But as he watched from the audience, the spokesman from Florida's teachers union wondered why lawmakers were listening to her. "It's a little difficult to understand why she is given rock star status," said Mark Pudlow of the Florida Education Association.
Sure, Rhee might have the ear of the governor and the praise of the president. Sure, Rhee has made national headlines pushing through controversial measures relating to teacher tenure, evaluations and salaries in D.C.
But Pudlow noted that Washington, D.C., schools score at the bottom of the national Education Week Quality Counts ranking, while Florida rates close to the top. He observed that some of Rhee's controversial efforts to fire "ineffective" teachers have been overturned by an arbitrator after the Washington Teachers Union fought the effort tooth and nail.
Valid concerns, said Rhee, an unpaid, informal adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. She suggested looking through a different lens for some perspective.
"Over the three years that I was there, we saw really record gains in academic achievement on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) examination," she said. "We went from being last in the entire nation to leading the entire nation in gains in both reading and math at both the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. And we were the only jurisdiction in the entire country in which every single subgroup of children improved their academic standing."
The 75,000-student district still isn't the best, she acknowledged. Far from it, in fact. But Rhee proposed that the gains that D.C. schools made might be replicated if other school systems adopt some of the "drastic changes" that she pushed through.
Her new national organization, Students First, seeks to get states to adopt similar changes. Rhee has made presentations to leaders in New Jersey and Indiana about these efforts, and she headed to Atlanta right after her Tallahassee stop to make a pitch to Georgia lawmakers.
But she sees Florida as the logical leader for altering the teacher contract landscape, she said, because of its history of adopting school accountability measures and the willingness of its leaders to take on the tough challenges that lie ahead. She credited former Gov. Jeb Bush — whom she has met with — for starting the ball rolling, and current Gov. Scott for taking the next step.
Some of Rhee's points to Florida lawmakers last week:
• End the practice of relying on seniority to determine which teachers stay and go during layoffs.
• Reduce the length of time low-performing teachers get to improve, so children's education is not wasted.
• Separate teacher evaluations from the collective bargaining process.
• Eliminate "tenure" and related systems.
House Rep. K-20 competitiveness subcommittee Chairman Erik Fresen thanked Rhee for creating a national blueprint for education reform.
"We have to start treating teaching as a profession," Fresen said.
Some observers question whether Rhee's approach does that at all.
Rhee has endured much criticism for her tough approach to the issue, where she didn't always wait for everyone to join forces with her before forging ahead. Some have contrasted her with Hillsborough County superintendent MaryEllen Elia, who is attempting to change the face of teacher evaluation with the local teachers union on board.
Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today editorial writer who wrote the Rhee biography The Bee Eater, said Rhee made things happen in a district that hadn't moved much before her tenure. Her relentless push for teacher quality won devoted followers, he said, but also had its fallout.
"The pushback that sparked, especially around firing teachers, was the biggest reason Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid as mayor and Rhee had to step down," Whitmire said.
That's a lesson that Florida could draw from, Rhee said, acknowledging her own failure to communicate well with the public about her efforts.
"I didn't do as good a job as I needed to, to proactively go out to the great teachers and say, 'We're not talking about you. What I need you to do is stay. We want to recognize what you are doing. It's so important,' " she said. "You have to be careful not to send a message that you are blaming teachers or that you don't think teachers are good."
In fact, she said, teachers are critically important to the success of any effort to improve education. The strong ones want the weak ones out of their schools, Rhee related, and students deserve nothing less.
Wise stressed this point just before his committee passed its "teacher quality" bill on a unanimous, bipartisan vote.
"We are not here to punish teachers," Wise said, adding that he wants to hear from more teachers, as well as parents and others in order to improve the measure before it gets to a final vote.
Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said Florida lawmakers should think twice about heading down D.C.'s path. The full costs of Rhee's tenure have yet to be borne out, he said, but already they have begun to arise in the form of deficits and back pay for improperly fired teachers.
Boiled down, Saunders had one simple message for Florida lawmakers: "Florida should not be listening to Michelle Rhee."
Jeffrey S. Solochek can be reached at solochek@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4614. For more education news, visit the Gradebook at www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/not-everyones-sold-on-michelle-rhee-gov-scotts-education-adviser/1151311
Education is on a race to the bottom
From in these times.com
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Hillsborough exempt from reforms
From TBO.com
by Sherri Ackerman and Elaine Silerstrint
TAMPA - It looks like Hillsborough County teachers will once again dodge a proposed state law to end tenure and tie their pay strictly to performance.
That's because Hillsborough stands alone among Florida's 67 counties with a special act that protects the practice of tenure, which grants employment protections to teachers who reach a level of seniority.
Two other counties enjoy that protection, too, but it's under challenge. Not in Hillsborough. The reason: Hillsborough is at least a year ahead of the rest of Florida on key education reforms, said state Sen. Steve Wise, an education leader in the Senate.
Wise, a Jacksonville Republican, has introduced a bill that would subject all Florida school districts to a plan Hillsborough created, a $205 million overhaul of the way teachers are hired, trained, evaluated and paid.
The Hillsborough County district's seven-year plan is funded by a historic $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Hillsborough is going to be exempt because they have the Gates money," said Wise, chairman of the Senate's Pre-K-12 Education Committee. "They're doing the research. We believe what they're doing is the right direction to go."
So much so, Wise said, that the district will serve as a model for the state, "with a few minor exceptions."
* * * * *
It's too early to tell what Wise's Senate Bill 736 will look like once it wends its way through the Senate and House. The bill got its first thumbs-up Thursday with a 3-0 vote by the Senate Pre-K-12 committee.
But Hillsborough school officials say they are pleased it allows the district to continue its work. They also are cautious about their unique exemption.
"This is the first draft of his bill and we certainly hope that will remain," David Steele, the district's chief information and technology officer and project director of the Gates grant, wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune.
Steele is concerned the bill is heavy on accountability of teachers but light on helping them succeed.
"Our evaluation system clearly has that mentoring piece for a reason," Steele said. "The district must ensure that teachers have the supports necessary to be successful."
Wise's bill is undergoing changes even before the Legislature convenes March 8 for its 2011 session. Here are some highlights of a recent version:
•School districts and the education department would create new evaluations and a pay scale that, by 2014, would be linked to student learning gains.
•Teachers would receive one of four ratings: highly effective, effective, needs improvement or developing, and unsatisfactory.
•Fifty percent of the evaluation would be based on student performance over a three-year period. The rest would rely on best practices and professional responsibilities.
•Parents would participate in teacher evaluations.
•Evaluations would factor-in student attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English language proficiency.
•Parents would be notified if their child's teacher is rated unsatisfactory three consecutive years or more.
Hillsborough's evaluation system is similar, except that by 2013, student performance will account for 40 percent of the overall review.
The remaining 60 percent will be divided equally between assessments by principals and by peers or mentors, who are assigned to observe and work with each teacher.
* * * * *
The Hillsborough County school district was among the first in Florida to participate in the state's Merit Award Program, which offers financial rewards for teachers whose students have grown academically.
Originally, teacher performance levels were tied to a year's worth of student gains. Under the Gates plan, that measurement, eventually, will be stretched over three years.
In Hillsborough, education leaders are considering whether to include input from parents and students on future teacher evaluations.
"The logistics of including parents/students are difficult," Steele wrote. "I think they may write the bill thinking of a parent evaluating 'a' teacher."
In reality, he said, even elementary students have three to four teachers and a high school student has about 10.
"A parent with two high school students would have a difficult time evaluating 18 to 22 teachers, having never observed a lesson," Steele said.
Wise's bill, if approved, also would phase out tenure.
Teachers hired on or after July 1 would no longer be offered professional service contracts or tenure. Instead, they would receive a probationary contract and at least two evaluations the first year, then an annual contract that the district could choose to renew or not renew without cause.
No annual contract would be given if a teacher received two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations, two unsatisfactory evaluations in a three-year period, or three "needs improvement" evaluations in a five-year period.
Current teachers and school administrators can choose to keep the salary schedule they have now or opt to participate in the new one. The new system allows them to earn more money faster. But they can't change their minds once they choose.
* * * * *
Teachers who have tenure now can keep it, but Wise's proposal, weakens the protection.
Tenured teachers have always faced dismissal for "just cause," which includes admitting guilt of a crime. Under Wise's bill, two years of consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations would be considered a "just cause."
Some critics argue tenure protects bad teachers because their contracts are automatically renewed unless a superintendent charges them with unsatisfactory performance.
According to one legislative analysis, during the past two years in Florida, fewer than 1 percent of classroom teachers received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
Firing them can take months if not years and can be costly for districts.
Proponents of the practice say tenure isn't the problem.
"It's not the impediment to identify and get rid of an ineffective teacher," said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
Tenure merely ensures that the process of removing a teacher is fair, say supporters, who worry that without protections, the highest-paid teachers could be laid off to save money.
"What is important is the whole way that we support teachers," Clements said. "How we reflect on our practice, how to improve, how to see where to get better."
Clements has worked closely with Hillsborough school administrators and says tenure in the district will remain intact — at least for now.
Hillsborough County has had a special tenure act since 1941. The Legislature has reaffirmed it since then. S.B. 736 makes note of the special act as well as two others, in Volusia and Duval counties. Hillsborough's would be upheld, but the latter two would be repealed.
Hillsborough teachers can apply for tenure after three years as long as evaluations show they are effective in the classroom. District officials have said they can extend the probationary period to four years to weed out poor performers if necessary.
* * * * *
Wise's proposal reintroduces some provisions of Senate Bill 6, a tenure-killing act adopted by the Legislature in its 2010 session but vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The new bill, however, takes a different tack.
Titled the "Race to the Top for Student Success Act," it takes its name from the federal Race To The Top program, in which Florida won a $700,000 grant after agreeing to many of the reforms outlined in Wise's bill.
Also, Wise and other committee members called for input from teachers, administrators, union leaders and others — something that didn't happen with S.B. 6. Teachers across the state rallied for its defeat.
But like its predecessor, S.B. 736 doesn't clearly define how to measure student learning gains for teachers in courses harder to quantify. These include art, music and special education.
The issue is of special concern to Gov. Rick Scott, who says his daughter is a special education teacher.
Hillsborough brought in experts from the University of Wisconsin to address this challenge with "value-added" measurements, Steele said. It's a work in progress, but the district is on track to roll out those evaluations by Aug. 31, he said.
The fear of value-added measurements is that if they don't work, they will ultimately harm the profession.
"Don't screw it up," Sarasota Classified Teachers Association President Pat Gardner warned Wise and the senate education committee Wednesday in Tallahassee. "If you evaluate teachers with value-added tables that don't work, you're going to lose the best teachers.
"And they won't come back," she said. "Everybody out there will know, don't go to Florida."
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2011/feb/12/MENEWSO1-teacher-tenure-appears-safe-in-hillsborou/news-breaking/
by Sherri Ackerman and Elaine Silerstrint
TAMPA - It looks like Hillsborough County teachers will once again dodge a proposed state law to end tenure and tie their pay strictly to performance.
That's because Hillsborough stands alone among Florida's 67 counties with a special act that protects the practice of tenure, which grants employment protections to teachers who reach a level of seniority.
Two other counties enjoy that protection, too, but it's under challenge. Not in Hillsborough. The reason: Hillsborough is at least a year ahead of the rest of Florida on key education reforms, said state Sen. Steve Wise, an education leader in the Senate.
Wise, a Jacksonville Republican, has introduced a bill that would subject all Florida school districts to a plan Hillsborough created, a $205 million overhaul of the way teachers are hired, trained, evaluated and paid.
The Hillsborough County district's seven-year plan is funded by a historic $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Hillsborough is going to be exempt because they have the Gates money," said Wise, chairman of the Senate's Pre-K-12 Education Committee. "They're doing the research. We believe what they're doing is the right direction to go."
So much so, Wise said, that the district will serve as a model for the state, "with a few minor exceptions."
* * * * *
It's too early to tell what Wise's Senate Bill 736 will look like once it wends its way through the Senate and House. The bill got its first thumbs-up Thursday with a 3-0 vote by the Senate Pre-K-12 committee.
But Hillsborough school officials say they are pleased it allows the district to continue its work. They also are cautious about their unique exemption.
"This is the first draft of his bill and we certainly hope that will remain," David Steele, the district's chief information and technology officer and project director of the Gates grant, wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune.
Steele is concerned the bill is heavy on accountability of teachers but light on helping them succeed.
"Our evaluation system clearly has that mentoring piece for a reason," Steele said. "The district must ensure that teachers have the supports necessary to be successful."
Wise's bill is undergoing changes even before the Legislature convenes March 8 for its 2011 session. Here are some highlights of a recent version:
•School districts and the education department would create new evaluations and a pay scale that, by 2014, would be linked to student learning gains.
•Teachers would receive one of four ratings: highly effective, effective, needs improvement or developing, and unsatisfactory.
•Fifty percent of the evaluation would be based on student performance over a three-year period. The rest would rely on best practices and professional responsibilities.
•Parents would participate in teacher evaluations.
•Evaluations would factor-in student attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English language proficiency.
•Parents would be notified if their child's teacher is rated unsatisfactory three consecutive years or more.
Hillsborough's evaluation system is similar, except that by 2013, student performance will account for 40 percent of the overall review.
The remaining 60 percent will be divided equally between assessments by principals and by peers or mentors, who are assigned to observe and work with each teacher.
* * * * *
The Hillsborough County school district was among the first in Florida to participate in the state's Merit Award Program, which offers financial rewards for teachers whose students have grown academically.
Originally, teacher performance levels were tied to a year's worth of student gains. Under the Gates plan, that measurement, eventually, will be stretched over three years.
In Hillsborough, education leaders are considering whether to include input from parents and students on future teacher evaluations.
"The logistics of including parents/students are difficult," Steele wrote. "I think they may write the bill thinking of a parent evaluating 'a' teacher."
In reality, he said, even elementary students have three to four teachers and a high school student has about 10.
"A parent with two high school students would have a difficult time evaluating 18 to 22 teachers, having never observed a lesson," Steele said.
Wise's bill, if approved, also would phase out tenure.
Teachers hired on or after July 1 would no longer be offered professional service contracts or tenure. Instead, they would receive a probationary contract and at least two evaluations the first year, then an annual contract that the district could choose to renew or not renew without cause.
No annual contract would be given if a teacher received two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations, two unsatisfactory evaluations in a three-year period, or three "needs improvement" evaluations in a five-year period.
Current teachers and school administrators can choose to keep the salary schedule they have now or opt to participate in the new one. The new system allows them to earn more money faster. But they can't change their minds once they choose.
* * * * *
Teachers who have tenure now can keep it, but Wise's proposal, weakens the protection.
Tenured teachers have always faced dismissal for "just cause," which includes admitting guilt of a crime. Under Wise's bill, two years of consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations would be considered a "just cause."
Some critics argue tenure protects bad teachers because their contracts are automatically renewed unless a superintendent charges them with unsatisfactory performance.
According to one legislative analysis, during the past two years in Florida, fewer than 1 percent of classroom teachers received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
Firing them can take months if not years and can be costly for districts.
Proponents of the practice say tenure isn't the problem.
"It's not the impediment to identify and get rid of an ineffective teacher," said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
Tenure merely ensures that the process of removing a teacher is fair, say supporters, who worry that without protections, the highest-paid teachers could be laid off to save money.
"What is important is the whole way that we support teachers," Clements said. "How we reflect on our practice, how to improve, how to see where to get better."
Clements has worked closely with Hillsborough school administrators and says tenure in the district will remain intact — at least for now.
Hillsborough County has had a special tenure act since 1941. The Legislature has reaffirmed it since then. S.B. 736 makes note of the special act as well as two others, in Volusia and Duval counties. Hillsborough's would be upheld, but the latter two would be repealed.
Hillsborough teachers can apply for tenure after three years as long as evaluations show they are effective in the classroom. District officials have said they can extend the probationary period to four years to weed out poor performers if necessary.
* * * * *
Wise's proposal reintroduces some provisions of Senate Bill 6, a tenure-killing act adopted by the Legislature in its 2010 session but vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The new bill, however, takes a different tack.
Titled the "Race to the Top for Student Success Act," it takes its name from the federal Race To The Top program, in which Florida won a $700,000 grant after agreeing to many of the reforms outlined in Wise's bill.
Also, Wise and other committee members called for input from teachers, administrators, union leaders and others — something that didn't happen with S.B. 6. Teachers across the state rallied for its defeat.
But like its predecessor, S.B. 736 doesn't clearly define how to measure student learning gains for teachers in courses harder to quantify. These include art, music and special education.
The issue is of special concern to Gov. Rick Scott, who says his daughter is a special education teacher.
Hillsborough brought in experts from the University of Wisconsin to address this challenge with "value-added" measurements, Steele said. It's a work in progress, but the district is on track to roll out those evaluations by Aug. 31, he said.
The fear of value-added measurements is that if they don't work, they will ultimately harm the profession.
"Don't screw it up," Sarasota Classified Teachers Association President Pat Gardner warned Wise and the senate education committee Wednesday in Tallahassee. "If you evaluate teachers with value-added tables that don't work, you're going to lose the best teachers.
"And they won't come back," she said. "Everybody out there will know, don't go to Florida."
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2011/feb/12/MENEWSO1-teacher-tenure-appears-safe-in-hillsborou/news-breaking/
Students never come first
From the Huffington Post
Larry Srauss
The recent formation of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst.org is a reminder to many educators of how many times we've heard that claim in its various forms:
We're going to put students first.
It's all about the kids.
Nothing is more important to us than educating the next generation.
Such statements have become clichés--but have they ever, on any consistent basis, been true?
One need only spend a few hours in most inner-city schools to answer that question. To be sure, some teachers and administrators sometimes actually can manage to put students needs ahead of all else--though there isn't much of an institutional mechanism to require it. In fact, putting students first often requires us to break the rules.
Current calls for "reform" and "accountability," including those of StudentsFirst.org, claim that compelling teachers and administrators to put students first requires firing teachers deemed ineffective and assumes that standardized test data can make such determinations and therefore protect students from miseducation.
There may be a place for standardized testing to monitor the progress of students but these multiple choice measurements--and the often abstruse data they generate--do not ensure quality instruction or positive learning experiences for students. They tend to encourage the opposite.
My own students seem to know that the tests aren't for them. They also understand that the manner in which their teachers are treated by the education hierarchy is in direct proportion to the manner in which they--the students--are regarded. If teachers are respected then students understand that such respect is for them as well. When they see their teachers being marginalized, undervalued, and insulted then students--those with enough awareness to notice--take that personally. And why shouldn't they?
SOME OTHER LIES WE OUGHT TO BE HONEST ABOUT
1. More money won't solve anything
That money is ill-spent in schools and school districts--and departments of education--is no revelation. From meaningless professional development to useless equipment and inflated text books and supplies--to name just a few examples--the wasting of these funds not only leaves less to be spent in ways that actually impact students but also erodes tax-payer confidence and creates the misimpression that increased funding for schools won't improve things.
Effective teachers and administrators know two essential truths about education spending:
•We can (and many of us have) gotten results with very little in the way of resources or other support.
•Increasing our resources, providing us with more favorable conditions in which to teach and learn, better equipment and materials and so forth--in short, spending money wisely on what we need--will result in even better instruction
2. School choice will improve education for everyone
The creation, beginning in the 1970s, of public school alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools--including the recent proliferation of charters--has helped some students to a better education. But the exodus out of neighborhood schools has made the educational prospects worse for those left behind. Creating more parental choices might help more children--and no one should deny the importance of helping improve education for even one more child--but such measures aren't going to repair the struggling schools. Nor will giving vouchers to parents to subsidize private schools for their children. School choice as a solution is, at best, grossly insufficient--unless every school on the choice menu becomes a viable one.
3. Purging the disruptive students will fix things
There is certainly a logical nd perhaps even a moral argument for removing the most disruptive students from our schools. What right do they have to sabotage the education of others? Can we really afford to invest so much of our time and other resources on a few recalcitrant children when so many willing ones have such dire needs?
But removing behavioral problems does not necessarily eliminate disruption. As a rookie teacher, I found that out when I lost my three most disruptive students--to various offenses outside my classroom--and almost immediately other students, previously quiet and relatively well-behaved, stepped into the void and took over the class. The problem was me.
Since then I've figured out how to keep students from taking over but have witnessed this same dynamic play itself out in the classrooms of other mostly inexperienced teachers. I have also seen many of the most challenging students stay in school and gain a little maturity and self-control.
4. Some children just don't want to learn
There are children and teenagers who do seem entirely uninterested in an education. Some of them will proudly declare it. In the triage environment in which some schools must operate, it is understandable to want to focus one's efforts on those with an expressed interest in trying to succeed. But we ought never surrender completely to the seeming self-determination of failure.
Which leads to the most important truth in all of this--the reason we really should keep trying to find a way for all of us to put students first all the time. That truth is the great untapped potential of our students.
Our collective fervor--our passion in this discourse and beyond--ought to be directed at realizing that potential.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-strauss/students-first-and-other-_1_b_821865.html
Larry Srauss
The recent formation of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst.org is a reminder to many educators of how many times we've heard that claim in its various forms:
We're going to put students first.
It's all about the kids.
Nothing is more important to us than educating the next generation.
Such statements have become clichés--but have they ever, on any consistent basis, been true?
One need only spend a few hours in most inner-city schools to answer that question. To be sure, some teachers and administrators sometimes actually can manage to put students needs ahead of all else--though there isn't much of an institutional mechanism to require it. In fact, putting students first often requires us to break the rules.
Current calls for "reform" and "accountability," including those of StudentsFirst.org, claim that compelling teachers and administrators to put students first requires firing teachers deemed ineffective and assumes that standardized test data can make such determinations and therefore protect students from miseducation.
There may be a place for standardized testing to monitor the progress of students but these multiple choice measurements--and the often abstruse data they generate--do not ensure quality instruction or positive learning experiences for students. They tend to encourage the opposite.
My own students seem to know that the tests aren't for them. They also understand that the manner in which their teachers are treated by the education hierarchy is in direct proportion to the manner in which they--the students--are regarded. If teachers are respected then students understand that such respect is for them as well. When they see their teachers being marginalized, undervalued, and insulted then students--those with enough awareness to notice--take that personally. And why shouldn't they?
SOME OTHER LIES WE OUGHT TO BE HONEST ABOUT
1. More money won't solve anything
That money is ill-spent in schools and school districts--and departments of education--is no revelation. From meaningless professional development to useless equipment and inflated text books and supplies--to name just a few examples--the wasting of these funds not only leaves less to be spent in ways that actually impact students but also erodes tax-payer confidence and creates the misimpression that increased funding for schools won't improve things.
Effective teachers and administrators know two essential truths about education spending:
•We can (and many of us have) gotten results with very little in the way of resources or other support.
•Increasing our resources, providing us with more favorable conditions in which to teach and learn, better equipment and materials and so forth--in short, spending money wisely on what we need--will result in even better instruction
2. School choice will improve education for everyone
The creation, beginning in the 1970s, of public school alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools--including the recent proliferation of charters--has helped some students to a better education. But the exodus out of neighborhood schools has made the educational prospects worse for those left behind. Creating more parental choices might help more children--and no one should deny the importance of helping improve education for even one more child--but such measures aren't going to repair the struggling schools. Nor will giving vouchers to parents to subsidize private schools for their children. School choice as a solution is, at best, grossly insufficient--unless every school on the choice menu becomes a viable one.
3. Purging the disruptive students will fix things
There is certainly a logical nd perhaps even a moral argument for removing the most disruptive students from our schools. What right do they have to sabotage the education of others? Can we really afford to invest so much of our time and other resources on a few recalcitrant children when so many willing ones have such dire needs?
But removing behavioral problems does not necessarily eliminate disruption. As a rookie teacher, I found that out when I lost my three most disruptive students--to various offenses outside my classroom--and almost immediately other students, previously quiet and relatively well-behaved, stepped into the void and took over the class. The problem was me.
Since then I've figured out how to keep students from taking over but have witnessed this same dynamic play itself out in the classrooms of other mostly inexperienced teachers. I have also seen many of the most challenging students stay in school and gain a little maturity and self-control.
4. Some children just don't want to learn
There are children and teenagers who do seem entirely uninterested in an education. Some of them will proudly declare it. In the triage environment in which some schools must operate, it is understandable to want to focus one's efforts on those with an expressed interest in trying to succeed. But we ought never surrender completely to the seeming self-determination of failure.
Which leads to the most important truth in all of this--the reason we really should keep trying to find a way for all of us to put students first all the time. That truth is the great untapped potential of our students.
Our collective fervor--our passion in this discourse and beyond--ought to be directed at realizing that potential.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-strauss/students-first-and-other-_1_b_821865.html
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Florida Legislature and their apparent distain for teachers
The Legislature greets controversial former D.C. Education Chancellor as if she is a hero, while most superintendants and teachers in Florida can’t get their phone calls returned or e-mails read. They listen intently to her as she spouts her anti-teacher rhetoric even though it is based on unfounded data or practice because it reaffirms what they already want to believe and do.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address several different sessions of the legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers, who got a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid, instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery the legislature should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place the meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address several different sessions of the legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers, who got a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid, instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery the legislature should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place the meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Parents, wake up... please...
From School Matters
by Judy Rabin
Hailed as a “hero” by supporters who came to hear her give the keynote address, Diane Ravitch took the stage for almost an hour as she spoke to parents, teachers, and activists from across the country Monday night at PS/IS 89 in New York City. They came from Seattle, Florida, Rochester, New York City, New Jersey, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, for the kickoff of the nationwide organization Parents Across America (PAA) and a call to action to take back public education.
PAA is a grassroots effort and political campaign spearheaded by parent activists and local organizations joining forces nationally against corporate interests who have hijacked public education and against the politicians who have turned their backs on the voices of parents and professional educators. “Since the top-down forces that are imposing their will on our schools have become national in scope, we need to be as well,” according to the PAA website.
Ravitch told the audience at this auspicious gathering, there is a perfect storm brewing in which those who have delegitimized public education are taking advantage of a bad economy and deep budget cuts to implement their own ideological agenda. She criticized President Obama’s Race to the Top by saying “education is not a race – education is not a competition. Good schools depend on collaboration, not on teachers competing for dollars. ” She said the punishments and remedies instituted under No Child Left Behind have escalated under the current administration and closing of schools destroys the social capital which consists of the relationships in the community essential for good, strong schools and a quality education.
The passion, excitement, determination and anger in the room were palpable as speaker after speaker got up to discuss how the current education reform is damaging their own communities, their schools and any chance of real learning opportunities for their children. They spoke of communities being torn apart in New York City and other urban areas where parents and teachers are pitted against each other. Members of the national board of PAA urged the audience to contact their local legislators and work to educate parents in their local communities by providing them with the tools and research-based evidence that illustrates why merit pay, charter schools and testing are failed policies that have not improved education or closed the achievement gap. In fact, with 20 percent of children living in poverty, Ravitch says poverty is the elephant in the room and it is an issue.
Up until now, parents have had very little say as the corporate reformers “move children around like checkers on a checkerboard” in their mindless pursuit of test scores, explained Ravitch. That’s why PAA hopes to galvanize parents and empower them to channel their frustration by working together with teachers and lobbying state legislatures and Congress to enact real, genuine education reform that will improve public schools, not close them. Some of the alternatives and ideas advocated by PAA include common sense solutions such as: high quality early childhood programs; parent education programs; reasonable limits on class size: medical clinics in schools: more professionalism in teaching: and more support and better working conditions for teachers; and acknowledging what every teacher and educator already knows -- test scores have been and still are closely correlated with the socioeconomic status of a school’s population.
Ravitch ended on a note of optimism. “There is hope even though all the power and all the money is on one side, and on the other side there is no one standing up for teachers. Parents are the sleeping giants of this debate. If the sleeping giant awakens you can take back American education and the time to start is today.”
For more information on Parents Across America go to: www.parentsacrossamerica.org and join -- today.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/sleeping-giant-is-awakening-as-parents.html
by Judy Rabin
Hailed as a “hero” by supporters who came to hear her give the keynote address, Diane Ravitch took the stage for almost an hour as she spoke to parents, teachers, and activists from across the country Monday night at PS/IS 89 in New York City. They came from Seattle, Florida, Rochester, New York City, New Jersey, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, for the kickoff of the nationwide organization Parents Across America (PAA) and a call to action to take back public education.
PAA is a grassroots effort and political campaign spearheaded by parent activists and local organizations joining forces nationally against corporate interests who have hijacked public education and against the politicians who have turned their backs on the voices of parents and professional educators. “Since the top-down forces that are imposing their will on our schools have become national in scope, we need to be as well,” according to the PAA website.
Ravitch told the audience at this auspicious gathering, there is a perfect storm brewing in which those who have delegitimized public education are taking advantage of a bad economy and deep budget cuts to implement their own ideological agenda. She criticized President Obama’s Race to the Top by saying “education is not a race – education is not a competition. Good schools depend on collaboration, not on teachers competing for dollars. ” She said the punishments and remedies instituted under No Child Left Behind have escalated under the current administration and closing of schools destroys the social capital which consists of the relationships in the community essential for good, strong schools and a quality education.
The passion, excitement, determination and anger in the room were palpable as speaker after speaker got up to discuss how the current education reform is damaging their own communities, their schools and any chance of real learning opportunities for their children. They spoke of communities being torn apart in New York City and other urban areas where parents and teachers are pitted against each other. Members of the national board of PAA urged the audience to contact their local legislators and work to educate parents in their local communities by providing them with the tools and research-based evidence that illustrates why merit pay, charter schools and testing are failed policies that have not improved education or closed the achievement gap. In fact, with 20 percent of children living in poverty, Ravitch says poverty is the elephant in the room and it is an issue.
Up until now, parents have had very little say as the corporate reformers “move children around like checkers on a checkerboard” in their mindless pursuit of test scores, explained Ravitch. That’s why PAA hopes to galvanize parents and empower them to channel their frustration by working together with teachers and lobbying state legislatures and Congress to enact real, genuine education reform that will improve public schools, not close them. Some of the alternatives and ideas advocated by PAA include common sense solutions such as: high quality early childhood programs; parent education programs; reasonable limits on class size: medical clinics in schools: more professionalism in teaching: and more support and better working conditions for teachers; and acknowledging what every teacher and educator already knows -- test scores have been and still are closely correlated with the socioeconomic status of a school’s population.
Ravitch ended on a note of optimism. “There is hope even though all the power and all the money is on one side, and on the other side there is no one standing up for teachers. Parents are the sleeping giants of this debate. If the sleeping giant awakens you can take back American education and the time to start is today.”
For more information on Parents Across America go to: www.parentsacrossamerica.org and join -- today.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/sleeping-giant-is-awakening-as-parents.html
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Michelle Rhee's teacher evaluation system has numerous flaws
Is she trying to sell this? Is this her million dollar idea? In a few months are we going to have to follow the money to her pockets? Sickening... -cpg
From the Washington Post
by Bill Turque
Mayor Vincent C. Gray says that the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, regarded as former schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's signature reform, has "a long way to go" before it is fair because it disadvantages instructors in schools with large numbers of students challenged by the effects of poverty and other social conditions.
"It's a step in the right direction, but it's got a long way to go to be a fair evaluation," Gray (D) said Saturday during a panel discussion on education and poverty at Adas Israel synagogue in Northwest Washington.
Gray's criticism of IMPACT, his most explicit since entering office, echoes that of the Washington Teachers' Union, a major financial supporter of his candidacy. It appears to clash with a core tenet of Rhee and her successor, Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson: that excellent teachers can help children thrive academically, regardless of the students' economic or social backgrounds.
It also is the first public sign that Gray and Henderson - who is his choice for the interim post and is regarded as front-runner for permanent appointment - differ on how education reform should go forward.
To illustrate his point, Gray cited two schools at opposite ends of the District's public education spectrum.
At Horace Mann Elementary in Northwest, 80 percent of the 269 students are white, 90 percent read at proficiency level or better, and none is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch - a common barometer of household poverty.
At Stanton Elementary in Southeast, where 100 percent of the students are black, 13 percent read proficiently. More than 90 percent are eligible for federally subsidized lunches. This year, the school was placed under the control of Scholar Academies, a Philadelphia charter school operator.
"It's not the same to teach in Horace Mann as to teach in Stanton Elementary," Gray said. "That's a very different challenge. And frankly, I'm not convinced that we have figured out yet how, with an evaluation system that covers all teachers across the city, that you account for the social challenges that inevitably are to be addressed."
Gray said that he has raised the fairness issue with Henderson and that she expressed a willingness to meet his concerns. Henderson expressed confidence Tuesday that she and Gray could reach common ground.
"The mayor and I share a common outcome at the end of the road, which is a great teacher in every classroom," she said. "He and I have a track record of working together on vexing problems."
The union plans to push Gray and Henderson for substantial changes in IMPACT and is working on an alternative evaluation system that it plans to propose.
"IMPACT is tremendously flawed," said Nathan Saunders, president of the union. "The question is, is the District attempting to maintain IMPACT as a legacy to Michelle Rhee, or does it have a commitment to a fair evaluation tool?"
Rhee drew national attention when she launched IMPACT in 2009. It replaced an evaluation tool that she said gave more than 90 percent of the District's teachers ratings of "meet" or "exceeds" expectations. Such assessments, she said, were not justifiable, given the school system's historically dismal academic record. Under IMPACT, more than 120 teachers were dismissed for poor performance last summer, an unprecedented number for the District.
IMPACT takes some student challenges into account when assessing a small segment of the teaching force. Half of the evaluation for reading and math teachers in grades 4 through 8 is based on growth in the standardized test scores of individual students. A model is developed for each student, predicting how he or she should do on the next round of tests. The model includes prior test scores, special education and English language status, and eligibility for subsidized lunch. The District does not use race or ethnicity as a predictive factor.
But 80 percent of the annual evaluation for most other regular classroom teachers makes no allowance for student challenges. Teachers receive five classroom observations in a school year - three from an administrator, and two from an outside "master educator" - assessing their fidelity to an elaborate set of guidelines called the Teaching and Learning Framework. It covers virtually every aspect of a teacher's classroom performance, including delivery of course material and checking for student understanding.
In the classroom of a highly effective teacher, according to the framework, the flow of the lesson "is never impeded by inappropriate or off-task student behavior, either because no such behavior occurs or because when such behavior occurs, the teacher efficiently addresses it."
Henderson said the framework is a tool to measure pedagogical expertise, "something all our teachers should have, regardless of the student population with which they work," she said.
D.C. Council member Sekou Biddle (D-At Large), a former schoolteacher, said that teachers in high-poverty areas need more and different resources to do their jobs, but he agreed with Henderson that teaching standards shouldn't vary.
"If we allow people to say that a community is more challenging because the kids are poor, so they should be allowed to perform less well, then we are really missing the key thing here," Biddle said.
Staff writer Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/18/AR2011011804873_2.html
From the Washington Post
by Bill Turque
Mayor Vincent C. Gray says that the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, regarded as former schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's signature reform, has "a long way to go" before it is fair because it disadvantages instructors in schools with large numbers of students challenged by the effects of poverty and other social conditions.
"It's a step in the right direction, but it's got a long way to go to be a fair evaluation," Gray (D) said Saturday during a panel discussion on education and poverty at Adas Israel synagogue in Northwest Washington.
Gray's criticism of IMPACT, his most explicit since entering office, echoes that of the Washington Teachers' Union, a major financial supporter of his candidacy. It appears to clash with a core tenet of Rhee and her successor, Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson: that excellent teachers can help children thrive academically, regardless of the students' economic or social backgrounds.
It also is the first public sign that Gray and Henderson - who is his choice for the interim post and is regarded as front-runner for permanent appointment - differ on how education reform should go forward.
To illustrate his point, Gray cited two schools at opposite ends of the District's public education spectrum.
At Horace Mann Elementary in Northwest, 80 percent of the 269 students are white, 90 percent read at proficiency level or better, and none is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch - a common barometer of household poverty.
At Stanton Elementary in Southeast, where 100 percent of the students are black, 13 percent read proficiently. More than 90 percent are eligible for federally subsidized lunches. This year, the school was placed under the control of Scholar Academies, a Philadelphia charter school operator.
"It's not the same to teach in Horace Mann as to teach in Stanton Elementary," Gray said. "That's a very different challenge. And frankly, I'm not convinced that we have figured out yet how, with an evaluation system that covers all teachers across the city, that you account for the social challenges that inevitably are to be addressed."
Gray said that he has raised the fairness issue with Henderson and that she expressed a willingness to meet his concerns. Henderson expressed confidence Tuesday that she and Gray could reach common ground.
"The mayor and I share a common outcome at the end of the road, which is a great teacher in every classroom," she said. "He and I have a track record of working together on vexing problems."
The union plans to push Gray and Henderson for substantial changes in IMPACT and is working on an alternative evaluation system that it plans to propose.
"IMPACT is tremendously flawed," said Nathan Saunders, president of the union. "The question is, is the District attempting to maintain IMPACT as a legacy to Michelle Rhee, or does it have a commitment to a fair evaluation tool?"
Rhee drew national attention when she launched IMPACT in 2009. It replaced an evaluation tool that she said gave more than 90 percent of the District's teachers ratings of "meet" or "exceeds" expectations. Such assessments, she said, were not justifiable, given the school system's historically dismal academic record. Under IMPACT, more than 120 teachers were dismissed for poor performance last summer, an unprecedented number for the District.
IMPACT takes some student challenges into account when assessing a small segment of the teaching force. Half of the evaluation for reading and math teachers in grades 4 through 8 is based on growth in the standardized test scores of individual students. A model is developed for each student, predicting how he or she should do on the next round of tests. The model includes prior test scores, special education and English language status, and eligibility for subsidized lunch. The District does not use race or ethnicity as a predictive factor.
But 80 percent of the annual evaluation for most other regular classroom teachers makes no allowance for student challenges. Teachers receive five classroom observations in a school year - three from an administrator, and two from an outside "master educator" - assessing their fidelity to an elaborate set of guidelines called the Teaching and Learning Framework. It covers virtually every aspect of a teacher's classroom performance, including delivery of course material and checking for student understanding.
In the classroom of a highly effective teacher, according to the framework, the flow of the lesson "is never impeded by inappropriate or off-task student behavior, either because no such behavior occurs or because when such behavior occurs, the teacher efficiently addresses it."
Henderson said the framework is a tool to measure pedagogical expertise, "something all our teachers should have, regardless of the student population with which they work," she said.
D.C. Council member Sekou Biddle (D-At Large), a former schoolteacher, said that teachers in high-poverty areas need more and different resources to do their jobs, but he agreed with Henderson that teaching standards shouldn't vary.
"If we allow people to say that a community is more challenging because the kids are poor, so they should be allowed to perform less well, then we are really missing the key thing here," Biddle said.
Staff writer Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/18/AR2011011804873_2.html
The mixed up Florida legislature gets’s it wrong again.
They greet controversial former D.C. Education Chancellor as if she is a hero, while most superintendants and teachers in Florida can’t get their phone calls returned or e-mails read. They listen intently to her as she spouts her anti-teacher rhetoric even though it is based on unfounded data or practice because it reaffirms what they already want to believe.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address the entire legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery they should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place n meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
Jacksonville’s own Steven Wise, no friend to public education is leading the charge for Ms. Rhee’s education deforms. He says he worked to avoid the problems that Senate Bill Six had last year but after listening to his glowing praise of Rhee (he called her a movie star) who he had address the entire legislature and the lip service he gave to teachers a few hours of committee time, it is hard to imagine that he didn’t already have his mind made up.
Before the legislature runs head long into dramatically altering the way teachers are paid instead of just listening to Rhee’s demagoguery they should do some research. Study after study has said merit pay based solely on testing does not identify the best teachers. It shows what teacher got the luck of the draw. It doesn’t work.
The legislature is also seeking to strip away from teachers what they mockingly call tenure but what is actually due process. Here in Jacksonville that means that after three years of service teachers can’t just be fired for any reason, which is what could happen in the future if Rhee and the legislature get their way.
Then finally before she took her limo to her private jet she also endorsed the proposed 5% pay cut to be given to all teachers, not the best paid group to begin with, to pay for their pensions. I get it we need pension reform but in this economy when many teachers are little more than pay check to pay check, is the right thing to do to take away five percent of their money. The millionaires that make up the legislature seem to think this is acceptable.
We want reforms, okay, but let’s make our reforms based on sound research not because a woman who was on Oprah thinks it is a good idea.
We want to streamline the process to get rid of bad teachers let’s do it but let’s not strip the good teachers of their right to due process and let's insist that principals and districts use the procedures in place n meantime.
We want pension reform, okay, let’s roll it out slowly so we don't hurt the thousands of teachers here in the state to much. Then at the same time lets close the tax loopholes which which only benefit a select few that see the Florida coffers looted of billions.
It’s hard to imagine the Florida legislature getting it more wrong, it is like the purposely want to hurt teachers and through extension public schools and children. Instead they should be working with teachers to find out what they need to help our children.
Please let your legislator know that, not punishing teachers, is what you want them to do.
The Myth of Michelle Rhee Debunked
From the washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)