Learning 2030

Like a Giant Robot

2011-09-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers...

This is the last post for Learning 2030.

My future posts will be here:

http://transformed.teachingquality.org/

I am joining with a great team of teacher leaders on a group blog called, "TransformED." We're like the Voltron of Edcuation Reform.

So, please follow along with me; meet my new blogger partners (great teachers, all); and let us continue our discussions about how best to educate our children.

edcamp

2011-08-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

Wow... just Wow!

edcamps are spreading across the edu-sphere. Teachers, tired of conferences where the "power that be" predetermine who will speak, when they will speak, and where, leaving teachers wondering if they should promenade down the exhibiter's hall or take in the local sights around the cookie-cutter conference center.

I attended edcampSFBay, hosted at Skyline High School (where I work) this past weekend.

edcamps are completely democratic. Attendees began posting ideas for sessions on the groups website weeks prior to the event. Even as late as that morning, more attendees had more ideas for more sessions. Then it was time to vote with our feet. We found the sessions that sounded most interesting; bounced from sessions to session if our needs weren't being met or if we just couldn't bare the opportunity costs of attending only one session that hour.

With computers, iPads, and smartphones, people at Skyline (and many who couldn't make it) kept up with colleagues and ideas on the live twitter stream, #edcampsfbay.

Here is an animoto show I mashed together from my pictures of edcamp.... hope you enjoy!

TEDxSFED: Rethinking Education

2011-07-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Mr. Diaz was the only speaker on the day whose ideas about education reform I disagree with... that said, I still wish him luck. 'Cause, you know, I might be wrong... ;-)

Total Participation Techniques

2011-07-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

The sub-title of Pérsida and William Himmele’s new book is, “Making Every Student and Active Learner.” It’s a good title. The Himmele’s offer thirty-seven quick and easy strategies that get more children in the classroom thinking more often.

We all have been the kinds of classrooms that the author call, “stand and deliver.” The teacher is at the front expounding on the information of the day. Some students are engaged. Sitting in the front rows, they take notes, raise their hands, and offer answers. Perhaps one or two students are actively disengaged. They sit bored in the corners, drawing, texting, or planning their next defiant outburst.

Most students in the “stand and deliver” classroom are passively disengaged. They do not cause trouble. Their eyes follow the teacher. They nod their heads and mutter “yes” when the teacher asks the group, “Do you understand.” But do they? Do they really understand? Are they really learning?

Teachers in the “stand and deliver” classroom never bother to see if every student is learning. They call most often on those students whose hands are raised. Occasionally, they call on one of the actively disengaged children, hoping to embarrass them into getting with the program. Rarely, if ever, do they call on the passively disengaged students who quietly fly under the radar only to land a “D” or “F” on the quiz or test.

The Himmele’s techniques promise to not only allow our participating students even more opportunities to think and share their thoughts; they also have greater potential to rope actively disengaged students into the lesson. We all know that when students are engaged and active in their lessons, they are less likely to be bored and mischievous. Best of all, these techniques will engage the passive students and give teachers instant feedback from all their students about how well they understand the lesson.

The authors break their Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) into four categories:

“On-the-spot” TPT’s are ones that a teacher doesn’t need to plan into her lesson. They can be used at the drop of a hat to check if everyone is thinking. For example, instead of the teacher asking a question and calling on one of the three hands raised, she can have her student do a think-pair-share that gets everyone talking about the question with their partner.

“Hold-ups” are another series of techniques to get every child answering every question. If the teacher is asking a multiple choice question, every student can hold up either their “A,” “B,” “C,” or “D” card to show their answer. For more complex questions, children can write on their individual white boards and hold then up for the teacher to scan. I’ve wanted white boards for my students, but baulked at the price. The books tip about laminating light-colored construction paper is perhaps my personal favorite.

I love getting my kids moving in the classroom and talking with their peers. The books “TPTs Involving Movement” offer lots of ways to quickly pair students with just a little forethought and planning on the teachers part.

Finally, the authors offer a series of TPTs that involve students’ notes. This section is full of examples of graphic organizers that we can ask our students to try.

Of course, not all teachers will find all thirty-seven techniques useful for their classroom. Speaking for myself, I saw that I knew of most of the TPT’s the Himmele’s describe. I already use several of them in my classroom. While at first blush, I thought that this book would only be half-useful; that I would only enjoy the 15 TPT’s that I couldn’t recognize from the chapter headings. Instead, I found myself pushed to think about even my most tried and true techniques in now ways.

All in all, I feel that I’ve already gotten hundreds of dollars in value from this inexpensive book.

4th TEDxSFED Talk: Dragons

2011-06-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

Young makers presenting their inventions with poise and grace. A table-top habitat for small pets and an animatronic fire-breathing dragon... cause, you know, who DOES'T want an animatronic fire-breathing dragon?!?!?

3rd TEDxSFED talk

2011-06-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Great, entertaining spoken-word artist...

2nd Post from TEDxSFED

2011-06-07T07:05:00.001-07:00

It's Me! Yeah!

First Post from TEDxSFED: The Freeze!

2011-06-03T13:29:00.001-07:00

Using Student Performance Data to Evaluate Teachers

2011-06-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

Two hundred teachers sat in the hotel’s conference room in Oakland, California, drinking coffee and getting ready for a two-day discussion on Effective Teaching. By the end of the summit, our hope was to have some agreements about what effective teaching looked like: an idea on how the schools and the district could measure it; and a plan on what to do to highlight teachers who were are most effective and help those of us who are struggling to be more effective.

As we greeted one another and talked about the coming days, the Jazz band from one of our middle schools set up their instruments and began to play. I turned to my colleague seated next to me and said, “This is what, ‘using student performance data’ to evaluate teachers should look like.”

Imagine for a moment that Jazz band. There they sat, performing. None of the students was concerned about getting an “A.” They were concerned about being perfect. In math, English, social studies, or science, a student may be trying to get 90% of the questions on a test right, but not the band. If a member of the band missed only one note in ten, that wouldn’t be an “A-“, it would be a catastrophe. Imagine the hours of “homework” each child put into this class, preparing for this test. I can imagine there were many hours of “homework”, far more than the number many of them put into their other classes. One of the secrets to this level of dedication was that the “homework” was actually called “practice” and that the “test” was a performance, in front of a real audience.

I think of this story as I read the report published by the Denver group of the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Initiative (NMI). In the interests of full disclosure, I am a member of the NMI group based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the last year, while the Denver group grappled with teacher evaluation models, our group discussed what a better teacher induction and career advancement model might look like.

The Denver report identified four key areas of work that the group believes will lead to a better teacher evaluation system:

Developing meaningful measures of student growth (including in non-tested areas) to comprise 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, as required by state law
Defining qualifications and training for evaluators
Determining how to account for school conditions and student factors in a teacher’s evaluation
Designing an evaluation system that informs both employment decisions and professional growth and learning

This post will focus on the first key area, that evidence of student growth should comprise 50% of a teacher’s evaluation.

Frankly, I worry about so much of a teacher’s evaluation being tied to student performance. I worry, because I fear that “evidence of student growth” too often is code for the single score on a fill-in-the-bubble test. Over the last ten years, I’ve seen deep and rich curriculum in California become shallow and bland as schools lost their focus on student learning as the obsessed over tests scores. I’ve seen teachers push research projects, student portfolios, and service learning to late may and June, after the high-stakes tests were over and done. I’ve heard principals in many schools change their tunes from, “We’ll never let the test dictate what we teacher” in the 1990’s to “We already know what materials are really important; the state has put that material on the tests.”

So how do we navigate these treacherous waters? I, like many of my colleagues at the Center for Teaching Quality, want teaching to evolve into a results-orientated profession. We’ve chosen a new version of the old adage, “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” Instead, we say, “it’s not what you say; it’s what they hear,” meaning that it is less important what a teacher teaches and more important what a child learns. More and more teachers are getting on board with this message.

In the June 2^nd edition of the Public Agenda Alert, “Teachers and the Tests,” they mention, “The conventional wisdom among many education reformers has been that teachers resist all kinds of evaluation, but in fact they're open to a number of ideas, according to the research we conducted with Learning Point Associates. Nearly all teachers (92 percent) rated the level of student interest and engagement as an excellent or good indicator of teacher effectiveness. Teachers also gave excellent or good ratings to how much their own students learn compared with other students (72 percent) as well as feedback from principals and administrators (70 percent).”

State departments of education should take a cue from the Oakland middle school Jazz band. We can evaluate teachers based on what children learn, but those assessments have to be composed of meaningful work. Imagine an alternate scenario, where the jazz band read a textbook about the theory of music and instructions about how to play an instrument, then gathered in the hotel’s conference room to “wow” us by filling in the correct bubbles about music theory and instrument play. How many hours do you imagine children would spend studying for that test? How well would a test like that tell us about what the children are learning and how effective the music teacher is? It’s a ridiculous scenario, for sure. However, it is exactly the way we have been evaluating schools for the past decade and how New York and Los Angeles are currently ranking their teachers of English and math.

So how to we navigate these treacherous waters? I think the Denver NMI group is taking the first steps; they are getting the voices of teachers into the debate. My hope is that the education policy makers in Colorado are ready to hear. Teachers are in favor of having our jobs evaluated, at least partly, on how well our children are doing. I can imagine the Oakland music teacher being willing to allow his evaluators listen to a performance in October, then another in May, and then stand behind the progress his students have made.

Other teachers, in other subject areas, could take the same stand. While I still say, “NO” to having myself, my school, or my children judged based on how many bubbles they filled in correctly, I stand behind their research essays. “Read one of their essays in October,” I told my administrator last year. “Read another one in May, then you’ll know how well I’m teaching my kids.” If I were an English teacher, I would say the same thing about my kids’ essays or poetry. If I were a science teacher, I would say the same thing about my kids’ experiments and lab write-ups. If I were a math teacher, I would say the same thing about my kids’ projects.

We really can use student-learning data to see how well students are learning and how well teachers are teaching. The trick is to be more concerned with the quality of that data than the ease with which we gather the data.

Growth Grading

2011-05-26T08:31:00.001-07:00

Imagine a typical student who is failing a class. This student is earning low scores on his quizzes, exams, papers, and projects. For the sake of this thought experiment, I’m going to stick to several imaginary assignments that each have 100 points possible as a perfect score. In the real world, teachers know that all assignments are not equally weighted, but the concept works with any assignment, and I want to keep the math easy for this article.

In this scenario, the student earns 20, 22, 28, 35, 45, and 60 on each of the assignments. In this imaginary class, the scores break down along the traditional 90-100=A, 80-89=B, 70-79=C, 60-69=D, and <60=F. So this student has earned an F on each first five assignments and then a D on the sixth.

In a traditional grading system, I can imagine this student giving up on this class. As you can see, even though the student has improved on each and every assignment, he sees very little benefit from his increased efforts. I can imagine many of my students ever even completing the forth, fifth, and sixth assignments at all, because they have given up hope. I can hear the child say, “Why should I even bother! No matter how hard I try, I’m still failing! I give up! I hate school!” With this imaginary student, and hundreds like him at my school, I can see a dropout in the making.

With a growth model for grading, this child can find reward in his increased efforts and hard work, and his improved performance.

Under a growth model, after the first assignment earning a 20 the teacher would have a conversation like this. “You earned only a 20/100 on this assignment. Now, you and I both know that this is an F. What I would like us to agree to is this: you come in for extra help, and make some commitments to work harder. Our goal is a 10% increase on your next assignment. So you’re shooting for at least a 22 on the next assignment.” The child asks, with typical teen hope, “Will a 22 get me an A, then?”

The answer is, “no.” Here is how growth grading works. On the next assignment, the student earns the 22. A 22/100 is still and F on content. But the student hit is growth target perfectly. On his growth goal, he has earned an “A.” I the growth model, these grades have equal weight, so the total grade for assignment two is a C. Then the teacher and student set the next growth target, another 10% or a 24.

On the third assignment, the student exceeds his growth target, earning a 28 instead of the hoped-for 24. His growth grade on assignment 3 is an A+, but his content is still an F. This averages to a C+ on the third assignment. Because the student’s growth was so impressive, he and the teacher set the growth bar a little higher, say 20% growth this time, or a 34.

On the forth assignment, he does well again. Exceeding his target slightly with the 35. Again, this is an F for content, but another A for growth, averaging to another C for the assignment. Together, they set the bar higher, hoping for 25% improvement on the next assignment.

Again, the student hits his target with a 45. Again the content and growth grades average to a C. Again they set a growth target, 30% this time, aiming for a 60

On his sixth assignment, he does it again. This time, while his growth grade is another A, his content grade has increased to a D. The average of this assignment is a B, perhaps the first B this child has earned in this class all year.

Can you see the reward for perseverance? Can you see the child realizing that hard work and study pays off over the long haul?

With this student, once his content grades have climbed to a C or a B, the growth grading ends.

I know this model flies in the face of some practitioners who are strong advocates for strict standards. They may argue that the content grade is too important to dilute with a growth grade and that an F is an F.

I know this model also flies in the face of fairness. If this student can earn a C for only 45/10 correct, what does that say about the student who is earning a 75/100 and earning the same letter?

I also know that this model of grading will hurt my school’s score on the high-stakes tests in May. This is because this child is not learning the material well enough to do a great job on that test, and the State of California is far less concern with a single child’s growth than they are about being able to rank my school based on a singe test score. Additionally, growth grading will hurt my school because, rather than abandoning hope and dropping out in the fall, this student will still be with us in May, along with his lousy test score.

I know all of this, and I don’t care. I don’t care because I also know that this child is learning more of my class content earning a 22, 28, or 45 than he would have had he dropped out. I don’t care because I would rather have this student in my school dragging down our test scores than on the streets dragging down his future. I don’t care because I care more about learning and hope than strict standards and fairness.

The trick is to see every child as an individual and find a way for each child to learn as much as she or he can every hour they spend with me. Growth grading is not for every student, but for those students who may lose hope, who may drop out, it can be a great tool to keep them connected to school and teach them that hard work and effort really can pay off.

Zombie Horde of Bad Teachers

2011-05-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

I disagree that there are hordes of "bad" teachers who, like zombies, are after our children's brains.

I work with a bad teacher. Everyone at our school knows this teacher. Most all of us agree that this teacher should not be in the classroom. We talk about this teacher among ourselves, and to our non-teacher friends and families. I know that kids are talking about this teacher too.

That's nearly 100 adults at my school talking about this 1 teacher.

That's over 1500 teenagers at my school talking about this 1 teacher.

In our stories, this teacher is no longer just one teacher, this person is now 1600+ lead characters in 1600+ stories.

This is how a small number of bad teachers can seem to grow to a horde.

What Coaching Should Look Like

2011-05-17T06:42:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that teacher evaluations are personality driven.

I’ve known administrators who were fully bought into the adversarial relationship between teachers and principals. These administrators seemed to relish taking a “tough stand” on “bad teachers.” The teacher evaluations were an elaborate game of cat-n-mouse. I saw teachers, whom I had never seen with a lesson plan, busy copying materials and checking in with colleagues do see if they had differentiation, multiple learning styles, and other key buzz words, “covered” in their lesson. Conversely, I’ve seen good teachers dinged over trivial issues, such as the daily learning target stated in the old-fashioned “Students will be able to…” rather than using the students voice by writing, “I will…” that is currently in vogue.

The arrival of these “gotcha” evaluation signals the opening of the second round of the fight. Not a year goes by without one of my colleagues coming to my door to ask, “Can you believe this? He gave me a ‘2’ on this! I got a ‘1’ on that! (We use a 1-4 point scale at my school, with 4 being excellent.) He was only in my room for ten minutes!” Trying to take advantage of a potential learning opportunity, I always ask, “Are any of the remarks things you think you should work on?” Typically the answer is a colorful version of, “No.”

I myself was the victim of a different form of bad evaluation. It was my first year at my new high school, even though I walked through the door with twelve years of experience teaching history, as far as my new placement was concerned, I was a new teacher. It took three meetings for my evaluator and I to settle on my goals and objectives for the year. Silly me; I thought they were my goals and objectives, but clearly I has misunderstood. The vice-principal couldn’t just tell me which criteria that I would be measured by, because technically they still were my goals and objectives for the year. Instead, like a good teacher with an unruly child, she would guide me to the correct goals that would be mine that year. After three meetings, I had her signature on my pre-observation form, but it had cost me my enthusiasm for having a second set of eyes looking at my craft and offering me insights.

The scheduled observation never happened. Month after month passed. Three times I scheduled opportunities for her to visit my class. Eventually, I stopped rescheduling, telling myself that the responsibility now rested with her. I finished out that year never seeing receiving any feedback.

It doesn’t have to be this way

This year I’ve seen an administrator who is personally invested in coaching. He sees his role as being an extra set of eyes for his teachers.

Yet again, a teacher came to my door to talk about her observation, but this time the conversation looked different. The teacher still received some 2’s on her evaluation, but they were in the areas that she was asking for help in. She and the administrator had talked about those areas. The amazing thing for her was this, instead of going over what went wrong or how to fix it, the administrator asked “What do you think you need this year in order to work on this? How do you think I can help you?” These were two questions she had never heard before.

As cool as that experience was; as invested in teacher coaching as this vice-principal is, it is still a symptom of the problem I’m laying out here. Teacher evaluations are personality driven. One principal sees himself as the new sheriff in town running the “bad” teachers out on a rail. A vice-principal is too overwhelmed to find the time to even visit the classroom of the teacher she is supposed to be observing. The third administrator does a great job, but only because he sees himself as a coach.

Formative Teacher Evaluations

Instead of paying “gotcha,” every teacher observation should be a partnership between the teacher and her/his observer. There needs to be enough trust to have hard conversations if necessary. Both the teacher and the observer have to be allies in the goal of helping the teacher be even better than s/he was the year before.

I can envision a future where the observer could be an administrator or a teacher-leader who spend a part of her job mentoring and coaching her colleagues. I use the term “teacher leader” because in my mind’s eye, the people who are observing, evaluating, and coaching teachers are teachers themselves. Gone will be the days when a teacher might push-back on a observation saying, “It’s been x years since the VP have taught kids, he doesn’t know what I am dealing with.”

In my fantasy world, every observer would behave like the “coach” vice principal at my school. The observer would have conversations with the teacher being observed. Together they would identify areas where the teacher thinks s/he is struggling, or additionally, areas where s/he is good and interested on getting better. I envision post-observation sessions where both the teacher and the observed can evaluate the teacher’s performance together. They can look at what’s good and what needs improving. Them together, they can create a plan by which the teacher gets the support and time s/he needs to make the improvements s/he wants.

The problem with formative assessments is this: they are hard. It is easy for a school administrator to identify shortcomings of a teacher, but it is hard to imagine the kind of professional development that the teacher may need to improve. It is really hard to find the resources to provide extra professional development. It is far too easy to point fingers and say, “Look at those test scores. Shape up or ship out!”

Differentiated Professional Development Could Help

Professional development (PD) at my school has been a mess. At the best of times, we gather all of the teachers into the library to hear a day-long speech from the guru that some one in the principal’s office or downtown had met at a conference and felt, “This will be the game changer at our school!” In the library, some of the teachers agree. They also think that the guru is the bee’s knees. For them, the lessons and ideas of the workshop will live in their classrooms, for a while. For most of the converts, the lack of on-going discussion, collaboration and support will result in a gradual fading of the new ideas and a return to business as usual.

Unfortunately, most teachers wont connect with the workshop. They wont see the relevance, or it will look like the reform idea they saw tried-and-died years ago. These teachers may try to make the most out of the professional development day by grading papers, but some may form affinity groups to chat among themselves or snark at the guru.

At their worst, PD at my school devolves into administrative meetings. Last year, I was the one responsible for this disappointment. Lat year, my school engaged in our Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) self-study. This huge undertaking ate up nearly all of our so-called PD time. Speaking for myself, I learned a lot from this process. Being one of the people responsible for writing the report allowed me to take a glimpse at everyone else’s classrooms and pedagogy. I saw some great things that I then wanted to implement in my classroom. I saw some of my own mistakes mirrored by my colleague, making it easier for me to see them.

While I was leading our “PD” about our WASC self-study, I couldn’t help but think of all of the first-year teachers in the audience. I was asking for their help in evaluating the school when many of them needed to know where the photocopier was. They were helping us create a five-year plan for improvement when they didn’t yet have a handle on their own classroom management. I kept thinking to myself, “They should be in these meetings. They have entirely different needs!”

What if our school had several “Master Teachers”? These would be the veterans who are widely viewed as having great lesson planning skills, great instruction, great classroom management, and so on. What is the school designed a Beginners Teacher Institute where 1^st – 3^rd year teachers held their PD sessions with those Master Teachers. For example, I’m widely seen as having good skills in conducting a parent-teacher conference, getting even angry parents to see the value of joining forces with their child’s teachers to form a success-team dedicated to getting improvements done.

After their third year, new teachers could be designated as “Professional Teachers.” Professional teachers could form their own Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) around themes that are relevant to them. One PLC could self-organize a year-long professional development series about integrating more Web 2.0 technology into their classes to enable students to collaborate on their projects. Another PLC could form to further their work on classroom management because they see themselves as struggling in this aspect of their teaching. An administrator, using formative evaluations, could help a teacher identify this need and connect with other teachers in the school who share this concern. A third PLC could spend a year doing action-research about their new project-based learning unit. The ideas just go on and on.

Master teachers would lead hybrid professional lives. In my mind’s eye, I see these great teachers having a foot in two worlds. They spend a part of their day in the classroom teaching a reduced load of children. In an elementary school, this could be accomplished by having Master teachers share a class, one teaching Monday through Wednesday, the other taking over Thursday and Friday. In a secondary school, I see Master teachers in front of children for two or three periods a day, having the other two or three periods for research.

Some master teachers would be paid by their school districts to create professional development lessons and then facilitate beginning or professional teachers who want or need that PD. Other master teachers could work one-on-one with new hires, mentoring and training them, ensuring that fewer new teachers leave the profession before they have taught for five years.

The money to do this is already in the system. Every year, I hear once again how our states are facing a teacher shortage. Policy makers look for creative ways to fast-track new recruits into the classroom. This is a false crisis. The reality is, we have a teacher-retention problem. Over ½ of all new teachers are out of the classroom before their fifth year. Thinking about a teacher-recruitment crisis is like thinking about filling a bathtub that has a hole in the bottom. Some folks are trying to get more water into that tub faster and faster. All we really need to do is fix the leak.

Huge sums of money are spent recruiting, training and placing new teachers into our schools. That money would be better spent supporting and mentoring the new teachers who are already there.

The personnel are already in the system. In California, over ½ of people who are paid with educational dollars are NOT in front of children. They are site administrators, professional development coaches, trainers, curriculum writers, managers, and policy wonks. Many of these positions could be converted into hybrid roles. Classroom teachers could spend a part of their day being local and state educational leaders. Conversely, educational leaders would see their standing with teachers skyrocket if they could tell stories about their own, recent, successes and struggles in their own classrooms.

Teacher leaders. It’s a radical idea whose time has come.

What is the Value-Added of a Gunshot Wound?

2011-04-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was asked, "Dave: As a more experienced teacher who has a track record of helping kids reach high academic standards, what are the pros and cons of using VAM to assess both student performance and teacher effectiveness."

Here is my answer:

As a classroom teacher, I dont see any pros to me specifically vis-a-vis the latest Value-added metrics. The whole point of Value-added is to attempt to isolate the many non-academic issues that follow a child into the classroom so that one can feel that, when they look at comparative tests scores, they are looking only at what the teacher has control over, or the teachers "value added."

The reason why I don't see VAM as helpful is because I am already in relationships with my kids. I already know that Kevin was shot twice in the leg this year when he was caught up in a scene of random violence that is all-too-common in his neighborhood. I already know that Shanice ran away from home for two months this fall and was living on the streets of Oakland doing God-knows-what to survive. I already know how these incidents and hundreds like them are effecting how much and how well my children are learning. I am already making adjustments to help these children heal from the too-adult wounds they have been afflicted with; help them move on; help them move back to something more resembling a childhood; and help them reconnect with school and learning.

In terms of the larger educational reform debate that is playing-out across the country, I think VAM is a useful tool. While I continue to rail against any idea that a single test score can be conflated with anything as complex as "learning," I do see VAM as an attempt to acknowledge that great teaching looks different in the suburbs than it does in the ghetto. I'm concerned that the usefulness of VAM could "rub off" onto the tests themselves, which are appalling. The tests we have been using to "grade" public schools have been measures of only the isolated facts and simple sub-skills that are easy to measure. They have not been the skills and knowledge we say we want children to know and be able to do when we adults sit around a table and discuss the purpose and goals of public education. I would like VAM to be used with a far better set of assessments.

For example, my school district, Oakland Unified, wants to know that every sophomore and junior can write an essay answering a deep and complex historical question using primary source documents. This is a test I strongly support. It is assessing real-world skills of document analysis, bias/perspective understanding, argumentation using evidence, and writing. I would be happy to see a part of my evaluation as a teacher based on how well my students essays progress from Fall to Spring. VAM may help an outside evaluator understand why Kevin and Shanice didn't improve on their writing this year, as we were working on far more important issues. Ultimately, this is who VAM is for, it is not for the classroom teacher, it is for those who wish to evaluate the classroom teacher.

Ultimately, as it is used currently, VAM is useful to the person who is located far away from my classroom. VAM is useful to someone who does not want to see and hear and feel the messiness of these children's lives. VAM is useful to someone who really, really wants the job of seeing if children are learning to be as easy and convent as looking at a spreadsheet. VAM is useful for someone who want to honestly acknowledge that thousands of American children are living in violent and impoverished neighborhoods with having to really know what that really means.

Book Review: To Teach: The Journey, in comics

2011-04-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Greatness in teaching engages students, interacts with them, draws energy and direction from them, and offer reasons to plunge into classroom life. Greatness in teaching is always in pursuit of the next challenge, the next encounter… greatness demands an openness to the new and the unique. For great teachers, it must always be, ‘Here I go again.’

Bill Ayer’s reworking of his book, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics is a wonderful, inspiring read, reworked into a comic medium (don't call it a genre) with illustrator Ryan Alexander-Tanner. One can only imagine the twists and turns of Ayer’s journey from being on the FBI’s wanted list as a member of the Weather Underground during the height of anti-Vietnam protests to being a kindergarten teacher and now professor or education.

I first met Mr. Ayers when he keynoted the Humboldt State University inaugural Education Summit. As part of the organizing committee under my then-mentor Eric Rofes, I was gifted with hours of conversations with Mr. Ayers over breakfasts and dinners. He is an amazing storyteller and a wonderful teacher.

Most of the story is about Bill thinking about teaching and about how his children learn. There are great stories about exploration, creativity, perseverance, and wonder.

Sprinkled through out are vignette from other teachers that Bill clearly admires. One such story talks about an elementary school teacher who has her class fill up a bookshelf every year as they learn about something that she, the teacher, knows nothing about. Together the teacher and the students become co-learners, exploring where their collective curiosity leads them.

Another story is about a high school teacher who is trying to “teach a really good kindergarten class with 18-year-olds.” In this story, we learn about how scary it is to allow students to control the learning environment, and how rewarding it can be.

Periodically the “specialists” form the central office show up in Bill’s classroom to explain to Bill how his children should be labeled as deficient or “at risk” and what standards he should be covering with his kindergartners. When they leave, Bill jumps upon his soap box to talk about how the standards movement, and it’s enforcers, get in the way of the very human relationship that is teaching and learning. After one such meeting, when his children are diagnose as ADHD, learning deficient, and “at risk” he states, “Focusing on what I can’t do diminishes hope and limits possibility. It pays no attention to what I can do.”

When the “specialist” leave, one of Bill’s children asks, “Are they coming back?” When Bill answers in the affirmative, the child speaks with what many teachers may agree is their own voice… “They’re weird.”

ASCD Whole Child Award-winning School

2011-04-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

“We don’t do that here,” an older student told another who was engaging in bullying. Both students were members of the same “family” at Quest Early College High School in Humble Texas, the 2011 winner of ASCD’s Whole Child Award. At the ASCD Annual Conference, I got a chance to speak to three generations of women from the school, Principal Kim Kelpcyk, teacher Denise McLean, and Janet, a current senior.

Families

Many school around the country are experimenting with Advisory programs – where groups of students meet regularly with an adult at the school. My own school in Oakland CA has Advisory for our freshmen, where 25-30 students meet daily with their Advisor. The advisor is the primary contact between the child’s family and the school. The Advisor is the adult who is taking a sustained interest in making sure that this child is having a successful first year of high school.

At Quest, they’ve taken the Advisory concept to the next level. Their “families” are multi-grade, where a student stays with their same Advisory for all four years of high school. Old family members mentor and look out for their younger “brothers” and “sisters.” It’s been a real culture changer in the words of Ms. McLean. She sees the families as an opportunity to engage with her students on a more human level, without the traditional power dynamic of teacher-student. Ms. Kelpcyk was Denise’s own family-mentor when she was a student at the school nearly ten years ago.

Janet was always the “quiet kid” and did not see herself become very involved with her high school four years ago. “But being in a family, being with older kids helpe get me out of my shell.”

I asked if the family structure helped reduce the amount of bullying at the school. In my mind’s eye, I could see one freshmen bullying another, then their older “siblings” becoming involved to mediate. Reality is even better than my imagination, as Janet described the instant intervention described at the beginning of this piece.

Internships

Quest students are not at school on Fridays. They are in the community doing service learning and internships. Janet, who is thinking about becoming a teacher herself, is working at a local middle school this year. Not just tutoring, she is actually designing and leading lessons with her cooperating teacher. The experiences she’s getting are influencing her senior project. Her team’s topic is human rights and Janet’s piece is specifically rights for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered people, but the planning for her presentation/senior expo is being influenced by the lesson planning she is learning as a part of her internship.

While the students are in the community, Quest staff engages in weekly professional development, and collaboration. The staff can meet to discuss their kids, the one’s they share, talking about their progress, struggles and needs. Additionally, they can share lessons with one another, look at student work, and help one another grow as professionals.

The Long View

Having three “generations” of academics around the table allowed us to discuss the changes Quest has undergone over the years. When Principal Kelpcyk was a student, schools didn’t have “families” or advisory programs. When Ms. McLean was “Denise” and in Ms. Kelpcy’s family at Quest, when Kelpcyk was a teacher and Denise the student, internships and the ability to earn college credit were still only concepts for the future. “In fact, “recalls Kelpcyk, “it was another student’s senior expo the year Denise was a senior, that got the school thinking about internships.” When asked what the school might look like in ten years, When Janet might be a teacher there, or in twenty years, when Janet is the principal, she is hard pressed to imagine the changes that Quest might undergo. “I can’t think of a way the school could be better.”

At least for the near future, I may have to agree.

My Tedx Talk...

2011-04-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

“What if a Jewish person turned into a vampire?” Kirin asked me one day. “Would that vampire be afraid of a Star of David like regular vampires are afraid of a cross?” “That’s the great thing about vampires,” I replied. “Because they are a literary devise, they can do pretty much whatever the author wants them to. So I guess the real question is what to you think would happen, Kirin?”

We talked for about fifteen minutes about Kirin’s Jewish vampire, specifically, weather or not he will cringe at a Star of David, and what that decision might mean. Would it mean that Kirin has replaced the exclusive rightness of Christianity with an exclusive rightness for Judaism? Or will it be more multi-cultural, where the vampire is really cringing at our symbols of goodness and righteousness where all vampires cringe at all holy symbols marking out the many paths up the mountain of faith?

In a deferent year, a puzzled-faced fourteen-year-old girl stuck up a conversation with me one afternoon.

“I was reading here in Hammurabi’s code.” She began. “I get how it says that if the farmer doesn’t keep the levees on his land in good repair, and when the river floods, the levee breaks and ruins his neighbor’s land that he’s responsible to repair the damage and pay the neighbor for the neighbor’s ruined crops. I get that,”

“But what if the farmer was renting the land?”

An old friend of my from our undergraduate days is now in a teacher credential program, becoming a teacher herself. She wrote me the other day, “I am currently placed in a 7th grade CORE classroom at a nice, though technically failing, middle school. My CT has 22 years of experience teaching English and World History and is a master at it. He's amazing. However, I only observe him teach English. I then teach the history portion, one period a day. Because I can't observe him teach history first, I am never quite sure of what I should be doing.” She wanted to come back to my school and spend time with me, watch me teach and then talk about instruction.

I wish I could. I wish I could invite my friend back to my classroom. I wish I could explore this semester’s deep questions with students. I wish I could keep better track of the Vampire Goldberg. I wish I could, but I can’t. I’m no longer in the classroom.

It’s a bittersweet problem. You see, my school is redesigning our structures. We’ve received a multi-year, multi-million dollar grant to organizing our students and teachers into smaller learning communities. Now, I’m the site coordinator for that process. I love my new role, but I miss teaching.

This brings me to the big idea of this talk. TED is all about big ideas, and this one comes from a group of incredible educators I’m working with through an organization based in North Carolina, the Teacher Leaders Network. The idea is the “teacherpreneur.”

What the heck is a “teacherpreneur”? Well, imagine the system we typically work with now. People who work in education are, for the most part, isolated in their roles. Teachers are isolated in their classrooms, teaching students. In another part of the campus, the principal (typically a former teacher) is spending her day running the school. Downtown, offices are filled with administrators running the day-to-day business for the school district. There are also coaches, professional development experts, curriculum designers, and a myriad of other roles being filled by former teachers and teachers on “special assignment” like myself.

Meanwhile, in the universities, professors, some former teachers other not, are training the next generation of teachers. For the most part, they are also writing the textbooks and instructional guides.

Meanwhile, over in our state capitols and in Washington DC, policy makers, many of whom haven’t been in classroom since they themselves were students, are writing policy that will guide (some say dictate) instruction.

In fact, just over 50% of the people who are paid with educational dollars are NOT in classrooms working with children.

Right now, for the most part, teachers who want to write, or be involved in educational policy have to do this in the evening and on weekends. Relying on the loving understanding of their spouses and loved ones, Right Wendy?

“Teacherpreneurism” is an idea by which educational leaders can maintain a foot in the classroom where the rubber of their ideas and policies hits the road of instruction and learning. “Teacherpreneurism” is an idea by which more classroom teachers can have more of a voice in national, state and local educational leadership.

Teacherpreneur is a hard concept for educators to fall in love with. It sounds too much like “entrepreneur” which we commonly think of as someone who has a new idea and wants to use that idea to make a lot of money. Many teachers, like myself, think that far too many people have for far too long seen opportunities to make far too much money “fixing” what is “wrong” with education with their latest silver bullets.

Teacherpreneurs isn’t like that. It’s more closely aligned with the idea of the social entrepreneur that my collegeaue John Norton recently wrote about.

“A social entrepreneur is motivated by a desire to help, improve and transform social, environmental, educational and economic conditions,” he writes. A social entrepreneur is not satisfied with the way things are – we are not satisfied with the status quo.

How often are we hearing these days that teachers and teachers’ unions in particular are defending the status quo, defending bad teacher at the expense of students – as if there are horde of bad teacher who, like zombies, are after the children’s’ brains! Because teachers and teachers unions don’t support the triumvirate of education reform current en vogue, high-stakes tests, accountability, and market-based school choice, we are casts as somehow in favor of drop-out factories and failing schools

Social entrepreneurs, and I offer “teacherpreneurs” say, no, neither. “No” to the status quo, and “no” to the triumvirate. But while teachers and teachers’ unions are saying “no” we aren’t spending enough time imagining and communicating what educational reform we ARE in favor of. It is my vision that teachers being in these hybrid roles will have the time and resources to envision a better way.

“Teacherprenuers” are not a way to make money fixing schools. Rather it is a way to honor the social entrepreneur work that many classroom teachers are already doing, by giving them time during their workday to do this important work.

Imagine:

A high school math teacher, who at lunch meets with her co-principal to discuss the morning’s events and prepare for her afternoon of school leadership while the morning principal is off to teach his classes.

Imagine:

A middle school history teacher who works at the local university in the mornings with classes of prospective teachers before heading back to the middle school for his afternoon students.

Imagine:

Teachers who have one or two hours everyday to do research and write about instruction.

Teachers who have one or two hours everyday to plan and organize the professional development they are going to lead their schools in later that week.

Master teachers who co-teach with first and second-year teachers and have the time to do daily mentoring for their apprentices.

Imagine:

An elementary school teacher who works Monday through Wednesday before turning her class over to her co-teacher so that she can spend Thursday and Friday at the state capitol advising the Department of Education.

What would educational policy look like if Arne Duncan took five weeks off from being Secretary of Education in July to teach sumer school?

If you can imagine these things, then you can visualize a “teacherpreneur.”

But were not there yet. I was in a workshop just two weekends ago listening to an amazing program this one school has for their teachers’ professional development. They’ve got teachers organizing themselves in to professional learning communities. The teachers are deciding for themselves what aspects of their craft they would like to get better at, finding the resources and time to work together and help one another become even better teachers. Unfortunately, one of the goals of this program is to identify the really great teacher leaders and get them into administrative or coaching positions for their city. I had to ask, “Do you mean that one of the goals is to identify your best teachers and get them out of the classroom?” Sadly, the answer was “yes.”

We’re still a big mind shift away from understanding the power of these new hybrid-roles of “teacherpreneurs.”

So imagine what the educational landscape might look like if we had hundreds of thousands of teacherpreneurs. I can imagine that the first thing they would do away with are the high-stakes bubble-in tests that are driving creativity and critical thinking into the ground. I imagine that when the leaders of the schools districts and the leaders of the teachers’s unions are the same folks, we would lose the adversarial teacher evaluation systems we have now and design something that makes sense for students and teachers.

I want to be a “teacherpreneur.” I want every teacher who want to do this kind of work have the opportunity to do so, and still spend a part of their workday or work week in the classroom with kids.

I imagine that my friend could come visit my classroom, watch me working with my students, and then we could talk about how my school is changing and growing.

I imagine that there would be less room in schools for drill and kill curriculum designed to improve test scores. There would be more room for critical thinking. There would be more room for collaboration among teachers and students, more project-based lessons and assessments. I imagine that there would be more room for creativity. There would even be room for Jewish vampires.

Shameless Self Promotion Alert

2011-04-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, April 9th, I'm speaking at the TEDx event in San Francisco on the future of education.

You can watch the live stream here.

I'll be speaking about "teacherpreneurism"

Nod to Linda Darling-Hammond

2011-04-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

Who said, "You can't fire you way to Finland," at the 2011 ASCD Annual Conference, to the cheers of a packed house.

Where on Earth does Finland, Singapore, and those other leading countries get the money to pay their teachers like professionals?

2011-04-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

What the Heck is a Teacherpreneur?

2011-04-02T22:15:00.001-07:00

What do Teachers mean by "Working Conditions"?

2011-04-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

What do teachers and teachers' associations and unions mean when we talk about "working conditions?"

Many non-teachers seem to think that we're talking about more pay, and fewer hours of work. This is not true.

When the Education Policy Analysis Archives published a "six-state survey of National Board-certified teachers (they) found that factors such as strong principal leadership, a collegial staff with a shared teaching philosophy, access to adequate resources, and strategies to work with parents were the most powerful incentives for them to consider moving to a high-needs school." ~ from Teaching 2030 by Barnett Berry and the TeacherSoultions team.

Bottom line, when teachers say "working conditions" we mean the supports we need to provide the very best learning environment for our children.

2011-04-01T16:55:00.000-07:00

Hat's off to Wordle for making this "Tree of Learning 2030".
What a FUN site!

Letter to a friend who is a new teacher... part 2

2011-04-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

My friend, who is a new teacher, responded to my first post. You can read that first letter and my friends response here.

I wrote back and would like to share. Bottom line of this letter is this: I wish I could be a "teacherpreneur."

I would love, I wish I could, have you revisit my classroom to see my kids and I working and learning together. That would be wonderful. Too bad, I’m not in the classroom anymore.

Problem is, my school likes what I do. They like the curriculum I developed for our freshmen history class three years ago. They like it so much, that they have adopted it for all freshmen history classes this year and they are asking me and my team of fellow history teachers to re-write it to address some additional goals we have for our young scholars. They like the way my team and I have reorganized our 9^th grade year. We’ve transformed it from high-school-as-usual to several smaller learning communities where our freshmen are grouped into cohorts who share an English, biology, social studies, and math teacher.

They liked it so much, that Oakland Unified has used our progress as a part of the foundation for a federal grant to further our work and do similar work at two of the other big, comprehensive high schools in town. We won the grant, and a part of that grant funds a site-coordinator position who job it is to complete the transition of the rest of the school from business-as-usual into smaller learning communities. I’m now in this job at Skyline High School and out of the classroom for the rest of this year and all of next year.

As much as I miss being in the classroom, I wanted this position. I lobbied my district and site administration to give it to me. I knew that if we hired an outside consultant, we would spend far too many precious months getting her or him up to speed about what we have done over the past year and a half before s/he could really begin working on moving the project forward.

I wish school officials could get next to the idea of hybrid-teacher roles. We’re stuck in an all-or-nothing mentality that keeps teaching and educational leadership separate. There are just too many ways for great teachers to stop teaching children. We all say the same thing as we choose to leave our classrooms, “This is a sacrifice. I love my kids. But, I think I can help more kids over the long haul doing policy work / curriculum development / teacher training / administration / etc…” I said the same thing, several times in the past week alone.

Why couldn’t my friend Carlisa and I both be site coordinators? She could teach math in the mornings, and do this organizing work in the afternoons. I could teach history in the afternoons and organize in the mornings. It would cost the same amount of money to pay two people part-time as to pay me full-time. She and I would be willing to spend some morning and lunch time every day talking together to make sure we were one the same day. Eventually folks would get used to the idea that it didn’t matter if they were talking to an African-American woman or the white guy; we were one site coordinator… together.

But, alas, this is not yet the world in which I live and teach. We’re still too hung up on have one person to go to; one person where the proverbial buck stops.

Changing this mentality is some of the work I’m doing with an organization called the Center for Teaching Quality. It’s also the topic of my TEDx talk April 9^th. The CTQ team and I are talking about a concept called a “teacherpreneur.” Yeah, I know, it’s a mouth full.

A teacherpreneur isn’t the same thing as an educational entrepreneur. Teacherpreneurs are positions where educational leaders can do the great work they want to do, sharing their expertise, and still spend a part of their day or week in the classroom with kids.

Teacherpreneurs can write curriculum for their district part time. They can be teacher coaches in the mornings or afternoons. They can spend every other week at their state capitols helping draft educational policy. They can even be co-principals.

They can do research alongside university PhDs or work at those university-based teacher preparation programs, providing a much needed, current prospective. Can you imagine a pre-service teachers listening to their professor and instead of hearing, “Fifteen years ago, when I was in the classroom…” they heard, “Good question! Something similar to what you’re asking happened at my school last week…”? What a powerful experience that would be!

It’s going to be a while. It’s going to take some work. Eventually we’ll get these kids of positions, and eventually they will even be the norm. Until then, we’re going to remain in a system of all-or-nothing.

I was at the ASCD conference this past weekend. One of the workshops was talking about a professional development strategy where teachers organized themselves into groups, identified their needs, and sought out tools and solutions. The presenter, while lauding the program, explained one of their goals. “We can see who the teacher leaders are. They are the ones who are doing the organizing. They are the ones who are doing the research. They are the ones who end up presenting to the group. When we find these folks, we recruit them for our administration tracks or our district coaching positions.” My hand shot up, “Are you telling us that one of your goals is to identify your best teachers and teacher leaders and get them out of the classroom?” Yes, yes they are…

Face-palm.

Just add a "0" in front and you'll get that 6-figure salary Conservatives say teachers earn

2011-03-31T16:14:00.001-07:00

Median Salary by Job - All K-12 Teachers (United States)

Compare your salary: Get a free Salary Report

Organizing PLC’s for Student Success

2011-03-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

I like the way my fellow teacher-leaders friends and I planned and implemented sweeping changes to our 9^th grade program, transforming that experience from high-school-as-usual into several smaller learning communities.

Now freshmen at Skyline High School are grouped into cohorts who share the same English, math, social studies, and biology teachers. We’ve reorganized our master schedule and our budget in such a way to provide each of these sixteen teachers an extra hour each day to collaborate with one another.

This was really hard to pull off. First we had to find the money. Last year, we organized our freshmen teacher teams to have their one preparation period at the same time. Each teacher taught four sections for their freshmen, and one additional section of sophomores. Their common prep was intended to allow each team to meet once a week. The teachers agreed to push an hour of their own classroom planning and grading to after hours so that they could spend an hour each week talking about the kids they taught together. One hour a week quickly grew to two to three as teachers began to see the power of collaboration. Additionally parents, who in years past rarely thought it was worth taking a whole day off of work to meet with one teacher, saw that they could meet with four of their child’s teachers and scheduled conferences in unprecedented numbers.

Our district saw the value of teacher collaboration and found nearly $300,000 to take the fifth class away from freshmen teachers, giving then two hours each day to work without kids. One of those hours is the teacher traditional preparation time, to grade, photocopy, prepare lessons, and the million of other tasks we have to accomplish to run our classrooms. The other hour is used for collaboration.

Now, in addition to teacher teams who share students having common time to meet, we even have organized the schedules of our teachers who share curriculum, too. This was a piece of scheduling magic! Using one history teacher as an example: she teaches four sections of freshmen, 1^st, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th periods. She has 2^nd and 3^rd periods without kids. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she meets 2^nd period with the English, Math, and Biology teachers with whom she shares students. Those days, her individual preparation time is 3^rd period. One Tuesdays and Thursdays, she meets with her fellow history teachers 3^rd period. During that hour, they talk about standards, assessments, instruction, and curriculum. They look at student data and help one another make changes to their instruction to insure that every student succeeds. On these days, her individual preparation time is 2^nd period.

It’s working great, but there are some struggles. Some of our fellow teachers have expressed their anger at the extra support that freshmen teachers have received. “We work hard too,” I hear. “It’s not fair for some teachers to get a second preparation period when every teacher can’t.” Some of my colleagues are even insulting about it, assuming that we’re wasting the extra time we’ve received, like we’re shopping on line or checking on our fantasy baseball teams. I wish these teachers would take one hour to visit one of our teams and see them in action, but so far the “haters” prefer to stand outside our “house” and throw rocks at us.

These teachers are like the peasant from an old Russian folk tale. The peasant saw that his neighbor was doing a little bit better than he was. The neighbor was doing so well that he was able to buy a cow. The peasant was so upset that he fell to his knees and he prayed. God answered him, asking, “What do you wish me to do?” “Kill the cow,” he replied. You see, for some folks, taking the neighbor down a notch can almost feel as good as raising oneself up.

Luckily for us, we haven’t bought into that negative kind of thinking. Instead, we’ve been exploring ways to find a collaboration period for all teachers. We know that all of our teachers will be able to do better business for their kids if we support them with extra time to work together and find innovative ways to make their instruction even better than it already is.

The Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) that I’ve been calling teacher teams up until now, are a great way to organize teachers. PLCs that are organized around sharing students can coordinate parent meetings. They can quickly identify students who are struggling, analyze why, deliver targeted interventions, and monitor the results. They can coordinate cross-curriculum projects like the collaboration we’re doing right now between English and history. While our kids are reading Romeo and Juliet, they are studying Medieval Italy and Shakespeare’s England.

PLCs that are organized around curriculum can analyze the standards. By “standards” I’m talking about all three: the standards that the high-stakes tests have forced us to deal with, even though we don’t think they reflect good learning; the published state and common core standards they we hold in higher esteem; and our own professional standards they our team has decided are that our kids “Must Know & Be Able to Do” when they leave us in June. These PLCs can talk about assessments: both the standardized fill-in-the-bubble ones we hate and have to deal with and the formative assessment that we’ve designed and use to guide our instruction. These PLC’s can plan projects for our kids, share instructional resources, and support one another when one of our lessons seems to have flopped.

We love our PLC’s. It’s a lot of meetings and a lot of work, but we see the positive benefit for our professional growth and, more importantly, our kids’ learning. “These are the only meetings I look forward to,” summed up one of my team mates.

Letter to a friend who is a new teacher...

2011-03-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

I read your tweet today, “another eeh day of teaching. This would be so much easier if I could observe what it is I’m supposed to be doing before I teach it.”

My heart goes out to you. Teaching is hard. It’s hard to imagine the gold nugget of skills or knowledge one wants these fresh faces walking out of the classroom with. It’s hard trying to imagine just the right kind of assessment that kids can do that will show you whether they got it or not. Making that assessment NOT look like yet another test or quiz, is harder still. It’s an art and a science to design just the right kids of experiences one thinks the kids need to do in order to gain the knowledge, learn the skills that are the goals of the day.

A colleague of mine with the Center for Teaching Quality (and one of the authors of Teaching 2030), Kilian Betlach wrote in that book, “First we ask new teachers to do too much with too little preparation, and then we ask too little of them in what should be the second stage of a teaching career.” While Kilian and I don’t agree on a lot, I cannot agree with that statement enough.

You’re being asked to do too much with too little preparation. I remember when you were visiting my classroom last year. We had great conversations about what kids need to learn, and how they could best learn it. I remember that those conversations were far too short, far too infrequent, and had far too much time in between each one.

Wouldn’t it have been great if we could have worked together for an entire year? I remember my own training. I was apprenticed for an entire year to a master teacher who really knew her stuff. Everyday in the fall, I was at her door. I observed her classes all day, working one-on-one with some students during guided practice time. During her preparation period, she invested tons of time into me: answering my many questions; discussing pedagogy; hearing about my frustrations with how bad I was at this new job! In the Spring, I took over two of her classes full time. Every day, we would plan together. She would give me excellent advise about the lesson I had planned, really pushing my thinking. Then after school, we would debrief.

I remember that this was one of the hardest years of my life! I was working at UPS at the time to pay rent, so every morning at two the alarm would go off. From three to eight in the morning, I would be off-loading trailer after trailer of boxes that would be delivered later that day. At eight, I would punch out and go home for a quick shower, shave and change of clothing to arrive at my Master Teacher’s classroom by her second period preparation time. After working in her classroom, and debriefing after school, I went to the University. There, from four in the afternoon to seven or eight in the evening, I took classes from the professors. When I got home, I had maybe an hour of time with my wife before I had to study and write papers and lessons for a couple of hours before I went to bed.

It would have been so much easier, and healthier, if I hadn’t had to work. If I could have gotten four more hours of sleep each night, waking at six or seven in the morning to go to school then university… but those are only memories now.

I’ve learned that I was pretty unusual that year. Most of my student-teacher cohort didn’t work with their Master teachers daily. We were only required to spend two or three days a week at our site school until our solo teaching began spring semester. I remember being really tired and cranky that year, but now I appreciate the extra time I was able to put in observing a great teacher at work and the hours she invented in talking to and training me.

Today, most new teachers are going through university-based programs similar to the one I did fifteen years ago. A growing minority of new teachers, however, is going to alternative induction programs like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project. These alternative programs offer very little training, substituting five or six weeks in the summer for the full year of university courses I took. During their training time, many TfA’ers or NTP’er are placed with summer school teachers.

Now, I’m not saying that the good people at TfA and NTP aren’t doing their very best training their recruits. I’m not saying that TfA and NTP recruits are worse teachers than I was when I was doing my student teaching and then first year as a full-time teacher. I’ve work with many TfA’ers and Oakland Teaching Fellow (our cities NTP branch) and they have been universally wonderful and dedicated young women and men. What I am saying is this: their five weeks is not enough training and support, even if I count the after-work support they get, it’s still not enough. It is certainly not enough before they are expected to be on their own with a full day’s schedule of children. Many of these young teachers then make up for their lack of training with a lot of chutzpa and long hours.

In contrast, the Urban Teacher Residency has a much more supportive model. They recruit new teachers into an experience where they can co-teach with a mentor teacher for a year. This is not unlike my traditional teacher preparation program experience. The urban teacher residents are paid during their residency year, which is very different than my experiences. I’m not sure if, in these times of ubiquitous budget problems, the residents earn enough to make ends meet without a second job.

Of course, you and I know that teachers need support after they have found their first job. I’m a dreamer. I think that school districts should provide new teachers with a mentor who works at the new teachers site. This allows them to check in often. I also think this that this mentoring should last longer than one year. I think it should last three year. Nearly ½ of new teacher don’t stay in the classroom after one or two years. We could talk a lot about the many reasons why, but I wont go deeply into that in this letter. What I will say is this: most of the reasons teachers leave the profession within their first three years of school could have been prevented, dealt with, helped with, if that new teacher had a mentor s/he could turn to. The New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz knows this. This is their core mission. Their work laid the foundation of California’s Beginning Teacher Support & Assessment (BSTA) program. Of course, once the mentoring concept from the New Teacher Center became a product to be mass-delivered in BSTA, the quality of the experience began to vary widely. I know new teachers who simple love their BTSA coaches, and others who report that BTSA was just another level of administrative crap they had to do and that it made their first two years harder, not easier.

I’m not sure what kind of support and mentoring you are getting in your teaching experience this year. I can guess from your tweet that it is not enough. I’m sorry about this. As a state, we can do better by our new teachers. We can choose to make training and supporting new teachers a priority. Instead of worrying about how we are going to replace all of the new teachers who leave the classroom, we could be making sure that our new teachers have the training and support they need.

Book Review: The Future of Schooling: Educating America in 2020

2011-03-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

I’m guessing that not very many teachers are going to read The Future of Schooling: Educating America in 2020, which is too bad – teachers all over the country should be having the kinds of conversations the authors of this book do.

Three of the four co-authors work for McREL, a consulting and long-range strategic planning organization, and the book has an obvious corporate tone. Additionally, the authors take great pains to not reveal where they stand in some of the hottest educational debates raging the country. Neither pro-Rhee nor pro-union; neither pro-testing nor pro-authentic assessment; neither pro-charter nor anti-charter, there is plenty in this book to anger every side of our overly partisan educational reform circles.

The goal of The Future of Schooling is not a product; they are not peddling any one of the four scenarios they writing about as they imagine what school might look like in a decade. Instead, they are promoting a process. They think that state and local boards of education, school districts, even individual schools should engage in a process they are calling “scenaric thinking.”

In brief, the authors identify two different debates they think dominate educational reform discussions, two “critical issues” in the terms of the book. They then take these two issues to create two axes of a Cartesian plane. The four spaces created by the plane then become the conditions under which four different scenarios are imagined. According to the authors, the “scenarios are meant to be plausible representations of what could happen if certain factors that are highly uncertain today resolve themselves in specific ways in the future.”

One of the two axes the authors use is the “Outcomes of Education.”

The authors do not engage in speculating what the “outcomes of education” should be. They don’t argue for more high-stakes tests nor to they promote portfolio assessment. Instead, one of their axes asks the question, “In 2020, will the outcomes of education be standardized or differentiated?” One can see the debate raging currently. On the one hand, we have a movement to national common core standards, asking all states to align and standardize their educational goals. The SMARTER and PARCC consortiums are doing the work right now on sets of assessments linked to the common core standards. It does not take a long leap of speculative logic to imagine the kind of pressure the last six holdout states will soon be under when new textbooks are rewritten to align to the new standards and it is not difficult to imagine the pressure for every state to then voluntarily adopt the new assessments. One the other hand, there is a movement growing led by writer and educators like Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink who argue that standardization is exactly the wrong direction to go and that American education and business can only improve when creativity and diversity of educational outcomes are embraced and normalized,.

The second axes used in The Future of School is the “Direction of Reform.”

The authors see two choices, “we can “optimize” the current system by tweaking, improving, and revamping it here and there as needed” Alternately, they see some in the educational reform debate who argue to, “abandon our current system altogether, blowing it up and starting over, so to speak, by engaging in a wholesale reinvention that results in a new system of schooling with few, it any, vestiges of the current one.”

Using these two “critical issues,” the authors imagine four scenarios:

Ø We standardize educational outcomes by tweaking our current system
Ø We standardize educational outcomes by blowing up and replacing the system with something entirely new
Ø We allow for differentiated educational outcome by tweaking our current system
Ø We allow for differentiated educational outcome by blowing up and replacing the system with something entirely new

To see how these four scenarios play out… your going to have to read the book.

Interview with Luis Torres

2011-03-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

How does the principal of a persistently failing elementary school win a national award? He does so by recognizing that their mission is to nurture the whole child, taking care of their physical, social, and emotional needs in addition to their intellectual development. He does so by realizing that hungry children cannot learn. He does so by putting children first and worrying about reading and math scores later.

ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter with

2011 Outstanding Young Educator honorees,

teacher Brad Kuntz of at Gladstone High in Gladstone, Oregon, and

Principal Luis Torres (in the tan suit)

of PS 55 elementary in the Bronx, New York.

Photo credit - ASCD

“Kids don’t know how to behave in school,” Luis Torres, principal of PS 55 elementary in the Bronx and one of ASCD 2011 Outstanding Young Educator award winner begins. “How can we focus on literacy and math if he doesn’t know how to behave in school?”

Torres is an advocate of doing schooling differently. He notes that current-trend school reformers are interested in doing school the same way we have always done, and concentrating on the same skills and lessons we have always focused. Unfortunately, children, and their struggles, have changed. “My kids are mentally far more advanced than kids were when I was going to school. I mean, they have to deal with stuff we never had to deal with. I’m talking to seven-year-olds about gangs. He’s seven years old and he already knows how he is going to get into a gang.”

Kids at PS 55 have few places to socialize and be kids. “They don’t have safe places to play,” Torres notes. His school is surrounded by four different public housing projects. Each project has it’s own identity and it’s own gangs who vie for control of the neighborhood. Some parents are very concerned about the dangers in the neighborhood and rarely allow their children to go outside to play, certainly never unsupervised. Other parents “just let their kids roam everywhere and are exposed to adult and older children activities that might not be good for them,” his eyebrow arching, allowing me to infer that he was talking about sex, violence, and drug abuse.

Torres now finds himself in a position where he must risk his job to serve his kids. “I could get fired for talking about these things,” he notes. “No one want to talk about where these kids live. One group of kids dumped a bag of garbage on the street saying, ‘Mr. Torres, let’s see if the city trucks sweep this up?’ That garbage is still there, along with a lot more.” Torres has now found himself involved in local politics. “Because we’re not close to the train or the freeway, nobody sees this and complains to the city. I’ve got to do that. Now, I’m the crazy principal who is going around talking about all of these things.”

In addition to his own job being at risk, PS 55 is perpetually at risk of being closed for failing to make their annual goals of raising math and reading scores on the state’s high-stakes exam. “It’s like a slap in the face every year, to these kids, and to the teachers who love then and works their butts off to support them.” Torres when on to speak about the inequity of schools in New York and how the poverty that his school is embedded in makes it difficult to hire teachers. “Once they (teachers) are here, once they are adopted by the community, they fall in love with these kids and they never want to go. But it’s hard to get a new teacher into the door. They look at how hard this job is; they look at the poverty in the neighborhood; we’re not near public transportation, and there is nowhere to park their car. Combine all of that with the higher salaries the other (suburban) schools can offer; combine all of that with the insult of being labeled “failures” every year, no wonder they don’t want to work here.”

School advocates who are more concerned with children than tests scores often call PS 55 an “oasis”. “We shouldn’t be an ‘oasis’,” decries Torres. “What’s an ‘oasis’? It’s the one good spot in the middle of a desert. Schools can’t be oasis’s. We need to be rainforest. We need to be one great spot in a great community.”

Curriculum 21: Heidi Hayes Jacobs

2011-03-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

Heidi Hayes Jacobs neither pulls punches nor minces words in the opening of her 2010 book Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, or her talk at this year’s ASCD Conference in San Francisco. She begins, “What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995?” I could feel a virtual finger alternately pointing at me and another wagging in disapproval.

I’ve been interested in the future of public education for ages. Working with the Center for Teaching Quality and the Teacher Leaders Network this past year and a half has added fuel to my fire. Punctuated through our group discussions about teacher retention, training, and retention has been the idea that public education is standing at the edge of a epoch, the end of over a century of analog teaching and the dawn of an age of digital learning. I actively sought out Jacobs book, and I was taken aback by the tone I assumed lay behind that opening question.

I felt a sense of guilt and shame that presumed what an honest answer from me must be. Even as I work to update and digitize my students’ learning experiences and environments, I know I am still moving at a snails pace. I can only imagine what some of my less-forward-looking colleagues might offer Jacobs as an answer, “I preparing my students for 20go-f&%k-yourself!”

If other readers are turned off by the opening question, I hope they will persevere like I did, because Curriculum 21 is asking exactly the right questions all educators should be asking themselves and one another as we navigate this period of education reform and reinvention. In chapter three, Jacobs puts these questions two ways, “What content should be kept? What content should be cut? What content should be created,” or, “What is essential and timeless? What is not essential or dated? What should be created that is evident and necessary?”

These are important questions, and Jacobs is in good company when she asks them. Sir Ken Robinson states in his RSAnimate video that is currently sweeping though school districts, “Some people say we have to raise standards as if this were a break thorough… Why would you lower them?” In his book, Out of Our Minds, he goes into more detail. “In place of a reasoned debate about the strategies that are needed to face these extraordinary changes,” he writes, “there is an insistent mantra that we must raise traditional academic standards. These standards were designed for older times and for other purposes.” He continues later with, “The essential problem is that many governments and organizations seem to think that the best way to prepare for the future is to do better what we did in the past – just do more of it and to a higher standard. The fact is we have to do something else.” Additionally, when Milton Chen, the former director of Edutopia, wrote about the six leading edges in education in his book, Education Nation, he purposely excludes a supposed “Higher-standard-of-what-we’ve-always-done edge.” On the cover of Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education, the child is working on a laptop, not a scantron test.

Jacobs offers concrete steps for developing a 21^st century curriculum or, more likely, of reinventing current curriculum using her three essential questions to drive curricular evolution. She would like to see schools, districts, and states use her well-developed curricular mapping system to ask these questions. One such way to map curriculum is vertically, asking, “What will a well-educated child know and be able to do when s/he is finished with this school or grade.” Vertical mapping takes all content areas into consideration. Alternately, schools can map horizontally, asking questions like, “What are historians writing about? What are scientists discovering? What mediums are writers and artists using? What problems are mathematicians grappling with?” These questions open the door to a content team asking the three big questions about curriculum: What should stay? What should go? What needs to be created?

Jacobs offers some suggestions about what to add and what to let go in social studies, English, World Language, Math, Art, and Science. She writes explicitly that teachers may disagree with her; she is fine with that, saying, “…that is precisely the point – to encourage an active inquiry as opposed to passive acceptance of content.”

But her real punch is to imagine a school of the future, she states, “We need new forms for schools rather than school reform.” Jacobs asks educators to look at four categories that have dominate school as it has always been done: Long and short term scheduling, Student groupings, Adult groupings, and Space.

Long and Short Term Scheduling. Without resorting to the phrase, “Because that’s how we do it,” try to answer these questions: Why is the school year 180 days long? Why is a school day 6-7 hours? Why do we break up our learning time into 45-55 minute blocks? Why is a school career 12 years long? Now, the fun part is asking these questions and dreaming up a little public-education sci-fi…

What would a school career look like that really supported student learning? Would students be able to graduate in only 10 years? Would we have room for children who needed 14 or 15 years? How would children tell us they are ready to graduate if we can no longer count on their birthdays to mark the passage of grades?

What would a school day look like that really supported student learning? Would every have to be there at the same time? Would they really have to take 5-6 equal-length courses each day? Could early birds learn at 5AM? Could night owls learn at 8 PM?

Student Groupings. Schooling is the only institution where a person’s manufacture date determines who they work with. “Good morning Ms. Jones. Welcome to Oracle! Now, I see on your employment paperwork that you were born in 1971. So… that will put you into our “39 department.” Ridiculous, right? Why are we so afraid of mixed age grouping on our classes? Music and art teachers can show us how it’s done; they’ve been organizing based on skill for years, using labels like “Beginning,” “Intermediate,” and “Advanced.” A freshman can enroll in the “Advanced” music class if she shows the teachers she has the chops for it.

Adult Groupings. Here is a place where many schools are already moving on Jacob’s ideas. Progressive secondary school are realizing that department meetings are far less useful than a meeting of the cross-curriculum teachers who share a cohort of students. The shared-student team can talk about the strengths and needs of their children and divide up the work of providing intervention, encouragement, or stretch activities. Curriculum Departments are still important, but their work of curriculum design and alignment should get done in longer, less frequent meetings. The opposite is true in elementary school, where vertical teams of teachers who will facilitate a child’s learning have a lot more to say to one another that the cohort of 2^nd grade teachers. Sure those 2^nd grade teachers have work to collaborate on, but like secondary departments, those meetings require more time and less frequency.

Space. Here, Jacobs isn’t just talking about virtual space. On-line learning is leading a complex existence in 2011. On the one hand, it is being touted and the next great silver bullet of education reform, with virtual schools popping up around the nation. At the same time, most schools and teachers are realizing that the internet is a powerful tool that can be as useful as one wants and is willing to invents time. We could simply replace our robo-phone call announcement with tweets or FaceBook status updates. Lesson plans can be posted on a blog or wiki for absent children to download and complete so they are not too far behind. Students can publish their work on wikis and blogs to allow for a greater audience for their products that just their teacher. Forward-thinking schools can use FaceBook and blogs to allow for students to collaborate on their projects with one another, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These same tools can be used to collaborate with other students around the world, or with experts in the fields that the children are researching.

Some educational futurists believe that the era of physical schools is coming to a close. I don’t buy this. I have a hard time imagining when the socialization job of schools and the day-care role of schools are no longer needed. I agree with Jacobs that the physical spaces of classrooms are going to change over the next 10-20 years. If “collaborations” really becomes recognized as a critical skill, then rows of individual student desks may have outlived their usefulness.

What do you think are the key issues teachers, parents and students should be discussing? What do you think are going to be the critical skills of 2030?

“Poverty is No Excuse” vs. Whole Child Education

2011-03-27T16:47:00.001-07:00

It’s like were arguing right past each other.

The “Poverty is No Excuse” crowd seems to argue that every child can achieve; every child can achieve at high levels; every child can be college and career ready when they graduate from high school. When they hear, “What about poverty? What about violent neighborhood? What about children who are mal-nourished and come to school hungry every day?” they think that the ones raising these questions are looking for the okay to quit trying. They seem to think that teachers who are concern with the emotional, social, and physical health of children are actually making excuses as to why our neediest schools are failing to graduate college-ready kids.

On the other hand, when I (as a member of the Whole Child camp) hear, “Poverty is No Excuse” I start thinking that the ones who are saying this are tragically uninformed with the realities of many of the children I teach in Oakland.

I think that they are unconcerned that one of my students was shot and wounded this year, and missed a month of school while he healed.

I think that they are unconcerned that one of my students ran away from home and was living on the street doing who-knows-what to survive on her own.

I think that they are deaf to the cries of “I’m hungry,” from my students who show up each and every day wearing the exact same pants, shirt, and hoodie.

What if these two camps could become allies? Crazy thinking in our overly polarized world today, I know, but let’s dream for a minute…

What if the “Poverty is No Excuse” camp really meant, “We, as a community will not let poverty get in the way of our children’s healthy growth”? What if they were concerned about getting job investment into the ghetto? What if they were invested in getting local governments to provide extra services to communities that need extra support? What if they were committed to healthy school lunches (and healthy school breakfasts and healthy school suppers as well)?

What if we looked at communities and school in our neediest cities that were defying the statistics and helping their children to succeed, identifying the support that were helping them, and finding ways to get those same supports in our communities?

Perhaps these two camps can beat their political swords into political plow shears and take some time to envision a community of success. What kinds of job investment; adult education; violence prevention; conflict mediation; social support; AND GREAT SCHOOLS would be imagine to exist in every community?

Then we can work together to find a way to get from where we our to a better future.

The Future of Teacher Professional Development

2011-03-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

“Professional development is going to look a lot more like what we envision for our students,” began Dr. Judy Zimny, the Chief Program Development Officer for ASCD.

What if teacher professional development (PD) was formative in nature? I’ve written about that topic before, arguing that the “gotcha” mentality has contributed to the adversarial relationship between teachers and administrators.

If formative teacher evaluations were all about helping struggling teacher get good and good teacher get better, and if teacher professional development were tied to those evaluations, then what would professional development look like?

Teacher training couldn't continue along the same paths as they have. They could no longer be whole-school, one-shot workshops in the library where the guru of the day poured out her/his canned presentation, typically the same presentation s/he delivered at the conference where the principal fell in love with this latest silver-bullet of school reform.

Instead, teacher PD in 2030 will have to be differentiated and on-demand where teachers alone or in small groups find and engage with the professional learning that they think is relevant for their practice.

I can’t stop thinking about all of the PD sessions I ran last year as my school worked through our Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accreditation. This was important work for us. We had been receiving a string on one-year probationary WASC accreditations, living every year under the threat that WASC may withhold our accreditation, leaving our graduated limited to only community college options.

As important as that work was for the school, it was neither relevant nor useful for our cadre of first-year teachers who needed to know where the photocopier was, how to schedule a field trip, how to engage their classes, and even how to simply settle the kids down at the beginning of the day.

A 2030 school would have a road-map of beginner PD for these novices to follow under the tutelage of their school-based mentors.

A 2030 school would have a cornucopia of PD options for its journeyman-level teachers. These teachers would self-organized into professional learning communities for the semester or year and submit a PD plan to their administration, detailing in which areas they plan to grow, how they will do this, and what evidence and products their administrators will see to show that their time was well-spent.

Master teachers in a 2030 school would be the novice mentors and event the PD gurus for their site. These hybrid teacherpreneurs would be compensated for their expertise and time by the school paying for one or two hours of their work day to engage in their independent research on curriculum, and instruction. The pay-off for the school would happen when the teacherpreneur facilitates high-quality PD for the school’s novice and journeymen teachers.

Organizations like ASCD could help. ASCD is wildly popular for their conferences; over 10,000 educators are here in San Francisco this weekend. They are less well known as a provider of in-line PD. In the world of teacher learning, in 2030, ASCD will play a much larger role, providing web-casts and virtual classrooms and collaboration spaces for journeymen teachers to use to implement their PD plans, as well as supporting master teachers in their research and development.

The resources are already here. ASCD could crowd-source their various on-line PD series. Master teacerpreneurs from all over the world could up-load webcasts or host virtual sessions. These teacherpreneurs would be compensated based on the number of discreet views of their products or attendance in their sessions. Teachers would pay a modest fee for an annual subscription to the ASCD Virtual University. Schools in 2030 might purchase site-level subscriptions to support all of their teachers.

Just like the differentiated instruction our best teachers provide for their children, meeting each where s/he is in her/his learning career, our best schools will meet their teachers right where they are in their professional careers, helping each one become even better!

Common Core Assessments: Will they Ruin our New Standards?

2011-03-27T06:24:00.000-07:00

David Cohen just wrote a great piece about a session he was in yesterday at the ASCD conference here in San Francisco. He writes about his fears that the new Common Core standards will be left a reeking hulk after the textbook companies politicians and consultants are through with them. While I am not as leery as he is, I have to agree that he is exactly right that the devil is in the details and poor implementation of these new standards can be a disaster!

Three years ago, our social studies department at Skyline High School, in Oakland California, realized that our sophomore history class had an enormous fail-rate. After collecting and analyzing data, we concluded that the primary reason for this was the lack of a relevant and rigorous class at the 9th grade level. In response to our conclusions, I wrote a new curriculum for 9th grade social studies, focusing on the goals of primary-document research, thesis development, and historical essay writing. Two years ago, I piloted the class for 120 9th graders. Last year, all of our 9th grade history teachers had adopted the curriculum. Today, not only vastly more sophomores maintaing at least a “C” in their world history class, but the AP World History class has expanded by 50% and is “the most diverse group of AP students I have ever seen,” according to our AP teacher.

Our department knew that doing the authentic work of a historian would be not only more rigorous, not only a better support for our children’s writing skills, not only more closely tied with the skills our children would need in college and career, but also more fun. When our six 9th grade social studies teachers read the drafts of the new Common Core Standards last year, especial the set about “Teaching Writing in History/Social Studies,” one of us said, “It looks like the policy wonks have caught up to us.”

As excited as I am about the ELA and Math standards, I must admit, I am a little fearful about the soon-to-be-written History/Social Studies standards. Traditionally, history standards are far more politicized as stakeholders ask the question, “Whose history will we teacher the children?” As a part of my work with the Center for Teaching Quality and the California Teacher Association, I plan to be right in the middle of that debate. My concern is that the new History/Social Studies standards are not a laundry list of names, dates and battles like many of the state standards it will be replacing.

I am also leery about the next generation of student assessments. A teacher might argue that the current version of her/his state standards is far more relevant and rigorous that the set of sub-skills and facts that are on the high-stakes test. S/he may go on to say that the high stakes attached to the assessment have overblown the import attached to those sub-skills and facts to the detriment of higher-order (and more difficult to assess) thinking and reasoning. Finally, that teacher may critique our current system by saying the primary merit for using the particular questions that we currently do on our student assessment is not because these are the skills and facts we most value, but rather because they lend themselves to easily scored tests. I would agree with that teacher and advocate that the next generation of student assessments must serve our goals and objectives in regards to what we want to see a well-educated young person able to do and know. Our vision of a well-educated child, or an effective teacher can no longer be the servant of inexpensively administered exams.

Five Perspectives on the ASCD Conference

2011-03-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

The Moscone Center in San Francisco is packed to the gills with educators. For the next three days, I’m attending the ASCD annual conference. Some of the sessions are going to be webcasted, so you can check them out here.

On Friday night, attendees were treated to smooth Jazz and Chinese food at the Welcome Reception. I met five attendees there, just at random, and was treated to five very different takes on the conference.

Ms. Thomas might be the kind of person one would expect to see at an education conference. She is an elementary teacher from Florida. She is here to explore more about the Whole Child movement. Ms. Thomas sees the community of education being a triangle of connections between the child, parent, and teachers. “We are all together in this goal of helping the child lean and perform,” she said.

She is fascinated by the surge of technology that has occurred in her thirty-year career. “We’re a new school, so there was lots of money there to get us set up right,” she explains. “You name it, we’ve got it.” Ms. Thomas has embraced her role as a digital immigrant, to use the terms coined by Marc Prensky. Many of the tools she is using to facilitate her children’s’ learning are tools that she is less familiar with than they are. “’Sit down with me, Ms. Thomas’ the children will say to me. ‘I’ll show you how.’” She loves being a learner together with her children.

Michael isn’t an educator at all. After a career with HP, he now works for Nelson Education, a textbook and digital content publisher. I asked Michael when he thought print would die, forever replaced by digital readers. “I don’t know if printed book will every be fully replaced,” he replied. He went on to say that television didn’t kill radio (despite the claim by the Buggles)...

Computers haven’t killed television. He sees a future that has room for digital and analog books.

Emily is a principal who is here on her school’s Spring Break. She is focused on Response to Intervention (RtI). She sees her teachers using the techniques and strategies to help their children every day in the classroom, but the school has not been engaging in formal discussions about the RtI concept, and as such, they do not yet have a comprehensive plan. “I was at Dominican University watching some of our student teachers engaged in mock interviews. When they were asked about RtI, they couldn’t answer the question,” she explained. One of her goals is to be able to facilitate professional development at her school so that their work on RtI becomes more formal and systematic.

Emily has a lot of hope that her work with her teachers will bear fruit. They are already doing some great work as they collaborate together about how their students are learning. “All the forth grade teachers in the district got together to talk about their students learning data. After the meeting, I got to visit some of my teachers and I could really see them using the ideas and techniques that they learned from their peers to make their instruction even better.

Michelle doesn’t work in education, but her clients do. Her company, GMMB does strategic communications. They work with educational policy makers, non-profits and other organizations. She is here to keep her finger on the pulse of educational trends and school reform. She’s concerned and excited about the Common Core Standards. Now that forty-four states have adopted these learning goals for English and math, she knows the next step, implementation, is crucial. “It’s a tough time for school professionals right now,” she told me. “Everyone’s eyes are looking forward to the Common Core, but they are still be evaluated on the old NCLB criteria.” Michelle has a lot of hope, though. “Seeing how the states are working together to do things right this time is making me feel really optimistic.”

Eric Sheninger is the principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey. Eric’s eyes are firmly on the future of public schools. He is here as a presenter, talking about what he sees as best practices in Social Networking. Saving some of his thunder for his presentation Saturday at 2PM, he was willing to share three tips for teachers wanting to use Web 2.0 technologies in their classrooms, “Keep it Professional; Update Regularly; and Celebrate Student Successes.”

Most schools are still afraid of social networks. They see them as distractions to be filtered out of the learning environment. At new Milford, Eric is encouraging his teachers to use social networking to hook their kids into learning. His math teachers are using document camera to film themselves working on a problem and talking out the steps, ala the Kahn Academy. “But we’re doing it in house,” he notes, “so it is the voice of the students instructor.” They are also using Poll Everywhere to enable every child’s cell phone to become a student response system. “The students use Google documents, we’re working with some corporate sponsors to get our textbook replaced with digital readers,” he went on. “I’m already nearly paper free in my work as the school leader. I’m trying to help my teachers get there too.”

Just a couple of hours over chow mien and a beer… five very different attendees. I think this is going to be an interesting three days.

Not All Merit-Pay Plans are Bribes

2011-03-15T14:11:00.000-07:00

Too often so-called merit-pay programs are nothing more than bribes to teachers so that they will work harder and produce higher student tests scores. Most teachers are offended by these programs because:
A. We already work 50-60 hours a week
B. We got into teaching because we want to help students succeed.
C. We should have been given a professional-grade salary to start with.

Not all performance-based pay systems are teacher bribes. One of the best alternative pay models is TAP.

First of all, TAP is based on the National Board for Professional Teacher Standards. National Board certification is not only the gold-medal standard for teaching in all states, it is also considered by its participants as the best professional development they had ever experienced.

Second of all, TAP is not simply more pay for higher scores, or Mr. Gates newest version, more pay for teachers who get higher scores to take more students. TAP is about teacher leaders, not unlike the hybrid teacherpreneurs Barnett Berry and the TeacherSolution 2030 team talk about in their new book.

TAP believes that school should be led by principals who see themselves less as administrators and more as instructional leaders. Principals should work in partnership with highly paid Master Teachers to lead their school. Highly paid Mentor Teachers work to train the next generation of great instructors.

TAP provides professional development to help all teachers grow in their expertise.

TAP believes that teacher evaluation is a difficult and complex activity and should never be based on the scores of a single high-stakes tests, but rather on a rubric that accommodates for subjective observations as well as evidence of student learning.

For these reason, even though I hate merit-pay-bribe systems... TAP is an alternate to traditional salary schedules that has merit.

Merit Pay is going to motivate me to work harder, but only a smidge'

2011-03-09T04:44:00.000-08:00

When I got into teaching 15 years ago, it was for the money. The fame was nice too, but mostly it was for the money.

Back then, when I was making a six-figure salary ($ 038,000) I knew that I needed to hold a little something back. Sure, I was making great benefits. I could go to the dentists, I had a gym and a cafeteria on my work site (nods to John Stewart).... But working 180 days a year is a lot to ask a person... I mean it's nearly 1/2 the year! It's like having to work 3 days a week, every week, with no weekends! So I held a little back...

You see, I knew, way back then I knew, that someday my political and punditry overlords were going to wake up to the fact that I've got to be bribed to do my best. They must have asked my Mom how to motivate me to do something I don't want to do. "We used to pay him a dollar to eat all of his vegetables," she replied. Aww, Mom... you know me so well!

So like I've said, I've been holding back. I've been working about 75% of my awesome-capacity. I mean seriously, 75% of awesome is still a "C" Right?

You might think that I'm ready to go all-in, now that Bill, Michelle and Arnie have put some more benjamins on the table. Man, are they wrong. I'm telling you, if they are going to put some more money in my pocket, then I'll give them a little taste. Say bump it up to 78%, you know, like a C+. They are going to be fist-bumping and high-fiving each other silly over their "success."

But I'm telling you, in a few months, that high is going to wear off, and who do you think they are going to come see? How many benjamins do you think they are going be slapping down? They're going to be all over me going, like, "Please, Mr. Teacher, sir. Give us a little more! We're jonezing for just a little more. Please! Take all our money, just give us a little more."

That me, brother. Straight up gangster teaching. Suckers better have my money!

High-stakes Testing is taking American School's in the Exact WRONG Direction

2011-03-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show - Diane Ravitch
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

So-called reformers ask us to look at Finland and Singapore because they are "beating" us on international learning assessments.

Let's really look at Finland: No charter schools; No high-stakes testing; More authentic assessments; 100% unionized teachers....

Battle at Dawn

2011-03-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

At first light, they waited. Fear gripped at their guts. Soldiers of Germany and England., who were separated by worlds of ideology and politics but only a few dozen yards of “no-man’s land.”

Green grocers, solicitors, university students, and lawyers; they were all soldiers now, privates and officers. Their now-fantasy-like lives of childhood games, studies, wives or lovers fading to distant painful memories called up from letters from home and shared in stories.

The dew steamed on the moon-like landscape, foreshadowing the clouds of smoke and mustard gas that would soon fill the air. A whistle blew, soldiers surged “over-the-top.” Suddenly, one is hit…

Water drips from a fourteen-year-old girl’s hair, her sweatshirt soaked. Laughter splits the stillness of the morning as the Hillsdale High School “Battle at Dawn” had recorded its first casualty.

For weeks at this San Francisco Bay Area school, 9^th grade history and ELA teachers had coordinated their units around WWI. English classes read All Quiet on the Western Front. They learned about setting, character development, perspective, and anecdote. They created an “auto-biography” of a solider-persona that they would enact at the Battle at Dawn. In character, they wrote stories about their lives: their hobbies, former jobs, loves, and reasons for joining the military. The facts and dates that usually dominate traditional history classes were absorbed in a day, the bulk of their time spent researching the “story” of the Battle of the Marne (from which the Battle at Dawn is inspired). They did the research on their personas, using physical and virtual resources to find images and stories to inform their writing. They created propaganda posters to recruit their fellow students, colleagues of their persona’s life.

The unit culminated with “armies” of British and German “soldiers” gathering at the school before sun-up to reenact the battle fun and safely.

When the Skyline High School team visited Hillsdale, at lunch we talked to a group of students. We asked them to talk about memorable projects they had engaged in over their high school careers. A senior, and two sophomores immediately mentioned, “Battle at Dawn,” their eyes lighting u at the memory. The freshmen mentioned how much she was looking forward to this project.

Whoot!

2011-02-24T13:59:00.001-08:00

I just got the email about an hour ago... I WON the Speaker Search and get to do a longer talk at TEDxSF. You can see a write up of my Speaker Search talk here (180 seconds on the future of education... in a word, it's creativity!)

On April 9th, I will be one of the presenters at TEDxSF. If you are near the SF Bay Area that day, you can register to attend the event here.

TEDxSFED: Rethinking Education

2011-02-23T18:29:00.000-08:00

I had a great time last night, speaking at the TEDxSFED Speaker's Search at KQED Public Radio. There were 14 of us, ranging from a parent to a corporate CEO.

We'll find out soon who made the top spot and an invite to speak at TEDxSFED on April 9th.

Here is a copy of my 3-minute talk...

We talked for about fifteen minutes about Kirin’s Jewish vampire, specifically, weather or not he will cringe at a Star of David, and what that decision might mean. Would it mean that Kirin has replaced the exclusive rightness of Christianity with an exclusive rightness for Judaism? Or will it be more multi-cultural, where the vampire is really cringing at our symbols of goodness and righteousness? Or will all vampires cringe at all holy symbols marking out the many paths up the mountain of faith?

In a deferent year, a puzzled-faced fourteen-year-old girl stuck up a conversation with me one afternoon.

“But what if the farmer was renting the land?”

Both of these children were in classes of mine at Skyline High School, across the bay in Oakland. What makes these children remarkable is not their uniqueness; I could talk all night, telling you similar stories. What makes them remarkable is that these stories of curiosity and wonder come from a so-called “failing school.”

You see, the problem for these children, and my school is that neither Babylonian rental law and nor Jewish vampires are on the high-stakes test in Spring.

The center piece of No Child left Behind is that all schools will have all students testing at “proficient” or above in reading and math by 2014.

100% of schools

100% of students “Proficient” or above in reading and in math.

A goal like that leaves little room for wonder. It leaves little room for creativity; for divergent thinking.

A goal like this reduces schools and teaching to an integrate game of trivial pursuit with only two categories of value.

So, contrary to the wisdom enshrined in the name of the legislation, children like these are told that what they are good at doesn’t count and what they are curious about doesn’t matter.

I had hope that things would be different after the 2008 elections, but as a new set of testing gurus begin work on a new set of tests, my hope fades.

I hope we can all take a deep breath and remember that education is a lot more complex than the score on a single test.

I hope we can come to our senses and demand that our government does away with these tests. As the farmer says, “You can’t fatten the hog by weighing it.”

We need fewer tests in our schools. We need more room for curiosity, more room for wonder. We need more room for Jewish vampires.

How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning?

2011-02-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning?

Ten leading educational reform thinkers weigh in.

How about you? How do you define 21-st Century Learning?

Cartoons for a Presidents' Day Break

2011-02-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've been typing so much about the purpose of schooling, I thought you might like a little break, so I got this cartoon for you... Mind you, it's still about education. It's about what I hope will be the most talked-about book in education reform this year...

The Purpose of Schools, Democracy

2011-02-20T10:06:00.001-08:00

Is the point of school to prepare children to participate in democracy? Perhaps, but first we have to disabuse ourselves the idea that America is a democracy. We are a republic. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get o vote on the health care overhaul. I did get to select some representatives who got a piece of the decision-making power. If we think in terms of a democracy, traditional schools certainly do not prepare children to participate in it. On the contrary, we are opposed to it. Instead, we like to prepare our children to accept authority and the rule of law. Democracy is messy and we prefer order. We teach them that there is a different class of people who get to make the decisions and rules. How often have you heard a teacher abdicate the responsible of discussing the purpose or reasoning behind a rule and allow for polite debate among children. More often we hear, “It’s the rule” or “The principal (or school board or state) made the rule, I have to enforce it.”?

What happens to children who want to debate the purpose of a rule? What happens to a child to wants to exercise her right to free speech too often, or too loudly?

We do eventually teach them about the structure and processes of our system of government. We teach them about many of the hot-topics of political debate raging in their time. We teach them to look at multiple sides of these issues, and then look for leaders who most closely match their views. We encourage them to support these leaders and help them become representatives. In the end, we reinforce our beliefs in respect for authority and rule of law. If you don’t like the law, find an authority figure who feels similarly and support him/her. We typically do not teach children how to organize and become leaders themselves. Again, our belief is that there is a different class of people who are destined to walk the halls of power and they are not us.

The Purpose of Schools, Caring Adults

2011-02-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

Is the point of schooling to create competent, caring loving and loveable people? Perhaps it once was, and perhaps the pendulum will swing back toward seeing relationship or inter-personal intelligence as valuable again. Certainly the world of professional work has recognize this need. Professional employers have time and again said that they want workers who can perform in teams, think creatively, and solve problems.

Turing to Sir Robinson again, “Throughout the history of state education” he writes in Out of Our Minds, “there has been a contest between the mainstream vie that ‘reason’ and ‘objective’ knowledge should dominate education, and those who have argued for forms of education based on feelings.” During the Romantic period, education thinkers like John Dewey argued that education should start with the child rather than with the canon. The purpose of education, said the Romantics, was to awaken the curiosity and talent of the child and provide a nurturing place for those talents to bloom. Some vestiges of this viewpoint are still with us today. Teachers are still encouraged to get to know their students and their students’ families. However, Teaching 2030 makes an important point when they quote Ellen Condliffe Lagemann in chapter 2, “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the 20^th century unless one realizes that Edward Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.” Thorndike personified the Classical school of educational philosophy that promoted a teacher-centric curriculum-centric ideology in opposition to Dewey’s Romantic philosophy of education.

While teachers are told to get to know their students individual needs, their families, and their interests; while we are told to differentiate instruction and to customize intervention and planning to suit the needs of each student, we are to do so in order to achieve ever-higher scores on the standardized high-stakes tests. What is measured by these tests, what matters in the world where the scores on these tests are conflated with “learning” is the canon. It is the Classical body of knowledge intended for student memorization. It is the logico-deductive reasoning championed by Thorndike. It is as if we are now being asked to use the methods of the Romantic school of education to serve the interests and achieve the objectives of the Classical school of education. Thorndike didn’t just beat Dewey, he made Dewey his whipping boy.

Student-run School-based businesses are Awesome!

2011-02-17T16:30:00.000-08:00

So… what would you do if you were at school and needed twenty dollars?

If you were at McMinnville, you would go to the Bank of the Bear.

The Bank of the Bear is a legitimate branch of Wells Fargo located in the student commons. The bank is open before school, after school and during lunch and, like the student store and snack bar, is run by the Business Management career pathway.

Wells Fargo audited and approved the training class that the McMinnville students take for this pathway. As a part of their class, the kids run the bank, take care of the accounting and are accountable for the books and the cash.

The Bank of the Bear finances itself with a three-dollar transaction fee on any non-Well Fargo customer. The bank allows Wells Fargo members to withdraw or deposit funds, and any customer can cash a check. No ATM’s at this stage of the banks development, but the Bank of the Bear was impressive nonetheless.

It really works! Skyline math teacher Ian Garrovillas deposited a check into his account. “I actually needed to deposit this check and I was wonder when I was going to be able to do that before we flew home, but then I was like, ‘Wow, I could take care of that right here!”

Dave Orphal also tested the services of the Business Management Pathway by withdrawing twenty bucks and buying a McMinnville hat from their student store. “I was floored,” Orphal gushed. “I’m a sucker for a good souvenir when I travel, plus, the Grizzly’s colors are black and red like ours. It was a no brainer. I think I was most impressed when my transaction didn’t go smoothly at the bank. The kid did freak out of call for a teacher to solve the problem. He trouble-shot the situation and got it fixed in minutes; just like a pro would.”

The Purpose of Schools, Intellectual Development

2011-02-17T06:42:00.000-08:00

If we say that schools are meant to provide intellectual development, then we only mean a narrow band of intellectual development. Schooling is dominated by what Sir Ken Robinson calls logico-deductive reasoning and memorization of an agreed-to body of knowledge. These two skills he calls “academic intelligence.” They are the skills that dominate our schools and are the ones which monopolize our standardized ways of testing if children are learning. While we may agree with Sir Robinson, that academic intelligence is a very important part of intelligence, we should also agree with him that it is not the end-all and be-all of intelligence.

There are lots of other types of intelligence. Unfortunately, these alternate forms of intelligence are given short shift by schools and valued far less than academic intelligence. Ponder for a moment what happens in school to kids who are really good at inter-personal intelligence. These are the ones who can talk to anybody and engage then in deep dialogue. We punish those children for disrupting class. The children with high levels of intra-personal intelligence (our deep ponders) most often quietly slip through the cracks and fail.

Physical intelligence may get celebrated at Friday night’s game, and this kind of intelligence may be highly honored in the social pecking systems of students, but if the athlete isn’t maintaining a “C” average in academic intelligence, then she is ineligible for the team. Frankly, we teachers will say, “What’s the purpose of school anyway? Athletics are extra-curricular.” “Extra-curricular” is a great word for the way physical, musical, and artistic intelligence are both honored by schools and relegated to second-class status. Sure, we think these talents are great, but we don’t think kids should focus on them to the detriment of academic or “real” skills that will help them get a job one day. Art, music, sports; these are extras.

The Purpose of Schools, Prologue

2011-02-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

In Jonathan Kozol’s essay “What does it mean to be well-educated?” he spends some time writing about the point or purpose of schooling. What is the point of school? In his essay, Kozol gave four suggestions:

· Intellectual development

· Creating competent, caring loving and loveable people

· Preparing citizens for democracy

· Preparing for work

Over the next week, I'll throw some ideas up on each of these suggestions.

Meanwhile... What do YOU think is the purpose of schooling?

More Sir Ken Robinson

2011-02-15T03:47:00.000-08:00

This fantastically entertaining RSA Animate video is the best summary of Ken Robinson's seminal thesis.

He lays his ideas about creativity; how the current "Raising Standards" movement is taking us in exactly the wrong direction; and what schools can do to prepare children for the next epoch in human experience.

Read his book, Out of our Minds.

We need a Revolution in Education, not more reform

2011-02-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

In this TED talk from last year, Ken Robinson talks about the need to radically change the way we educate children.

We have built education on a fast-food model, he claims. Everything is standardized. If educational reformers such as Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee have their way, even more standardization is to come. He recommends an alternative. Just like Zagat and Michelin Guide restaurants are not standardized, but creative and customized, so too education should forgo the old standardized paradigm and move to a creative and customized model.

Our education system is designed like a factory. It's linear, where batches of children start at the beginning of the system and moved through each successive stage until they wind up at the end. "Defective" children, like defective factory products, are discarded along the way. As an alternative, he suggests modeling education more agrarianly, creating the environment and best conditions for childrne to grow and supporting them as the flourish.

Just two more years until we are all “Failing Schools.”

2011-02-11T07:16:00.001-08:00

Just a reminder that the center piece of No Child left Behind is that all schools will have all students testing at “proficient” or above in reading and math by 2014.

100% of schools

100% of students “Proficient” or above

That figure includes the kids who are in the process of dropping out; it includes the kids who have been in America only a few years or a few weeks and don’t yet speak English; it includes kids with special needs; it includes the kids with chronic attendance problems; it includes the kids living in abject poverty; it includes the kids who live in violent neighborhoods.

It includes Kevin (not his real name) who was shot last weekend. Kevin was one of my kids last year. Together with his mom and through a Herculean effort, the three of us succeeded in getting his grades from a series of “F’s” to mainly “D’s” and “C’s”.

It included Shannon (not her real name) who ran away from home in October. None of the adults in her life knew where she was until the police arrested her on the streets of Oakland and returned her home in February.

I wonder if they’ll be ready for his high-stakes tests in Spring. I wonder if the Value-added gurus have sophisticated enough formulas to determine the effectiveness of Kevin and Shannon’s teachers.

I wonder if we can take a deep breath and remember that education is a lot more complex than the score on a single test.

Formative Evaluations

2011-01-31T09:56:00.001-08:00

While most of the media’s attention has been focused on high-stakes summative evaluations, formative evaluations are gaining a lot of traction among teachers.

Summative evaluations are primary used to rank, sort, and label. Final exams are a good example of these. When a student takes a final, she does not have any opportunities to revise her work. Her teacher does not use the results of the final to inform the next stage of the student’s learning. The stakes of the summative assessment are usually very high. The score on the final is used solely to rank the student in relation to other students and help give them their grade/label.

On the contrary, formative assessments are used as part of a feedback loop between the learner and the teacher. The stakes on a formative assessment are usually low, and a teacher will use a formative assessment to see how well her student learned the concepts or skills of the last lesson. She will use the information to determine what concepts and skills need re-teaching, or if the pace of the class needs to speed up or slow down.

While teachers are encouraged to use formative assessments with their students, some education reformers are using high-stakes summative assessments on teachers and schools.

I wonder what it might look like is school and district administrators, state and federal legislators used formative assessments to evaluate teachers and schools.

Some reformers want to use summative assessments to label teachers as effective, average, or failing. This is seductive because it is easy. All of the responsibility rests on the teacher. “Your tests scores are low, fix it.” Could you imagine a teacher behaving this way with students? I can too. I can see a teacher presenting information all week, month, or semester then giving a summative assessment. The kid gets an “F” and the teacher says, “Do better.”

We wouldn’t accept this kind of behavior from a teacher. Why should we expect this kind of behavior from school administrators or politicians?

As an alternative:

· School administrators should use formative assessments for their teachers

· These assessments should be a blend of observations of the classroom and an analysis of student work

· The school administrator should use the data she sees in the observations and analysis to identify strengths and shortcomings in the teachers work

· Then, supports and interventions should be used to assist the teacher improve his work and, consequently, improve the work his students are doing

In parallel:

· Local and state educational officials should use formative assessments to look at schools

· These assessments should also include school observations and analysis of school outcome data

· Schools data could include many things that are far more important that mere scores on a one-shot tests

· We should look at graduation rates, drop-out rates, and success rates of the schools recent graduates

· Rather than look at such data and then label a school as “failing,” local and state officials should look at the strengths and shortcomings of the schools and identify supports and intervention to help school improve.

The problem with formative assessments is this: they are hard. It is easy for teachers to identify strengths and shortcomings of their students, but it is hard to identify the kinds of supports or interventions a child needs to improve. It is very hard to find the time and resources to implement those supports and interventions. Likewise, it is easy for a school administrator to identify shortcomings of a teacher, but it is hard to imagine the kind of professional development that the teacher may need to improve. It is really hard to find the resources to provide extra professional development. It is easy for government and reformers to point their fingers and say, “Schools are failing. Look at those test scores. Shape up or ship out!”

The problem with summative assessments is that they do nothing to help solve the problem. Teachers can’t help their children after they do poorly on a final exam. Administrators can’t help their teachers after labeling them as “ineffective” on a review. Politicians and reformers can’t help schools by just labeling them as “failing.” As the iconic farmer would say, “You can’t fatten a chicken by weighing it.”

Instead of our obsession for labeling and finger pointing, we need to work together to actually help schools do better. It’s hard work, but it is the only way we’ll make any progress.

The day I was attacked by a student.

2011-01-13T12:37:00.001-08:00

Watching the chair fly through the office door, I thought to myself, “This isn’t going to be good.”

I had not come to Vice Principal’s office looking for a fight, or even an argument. I wanted to talk about a new chart that we could use to track the daily progress of our kids who were in danger of failing their classes for the semester, and hopefully get some of them back on track. Someone had other ideas.

I hear that it started suddenly. Josh (not his real name) was in the office with his mom to talk about his re-entry to school after participating in a large-scale fight. The conversation wasn’t going well and the Vice Principal had said that perhaps today was not the best day to have this meeting and that the three of them should try again tomorrow.

Josh was unhappy. We could tell right away because he swept all of the binders off of their shelf and onto the floor, before grabbing the chair he had been sitting in and flinging it through the door and into the introduction to my story.

As he fled the office, Josh ran straight into me, his arms flailing, one fist connected with my face, the other with my shoulder. Turning around, Josh spied the guillotine paper cutter and grabbed it off of a table. My teacher readers know well the equipment I am writing about and their minds have probably already gone where my mind went when I saw him heave the paper cutter. A guillotine paper cutter is a fourteen-inch blade attached to a base on one end. The blade is sharp enough and heavy enough to cut through twenty or thirty sheets of paper in one “ker-chunk!”

In my mind’s eye, I pictured the huge gash on Josh’s hand. The Vice Principal imagined the paper cutter hurdling through the air directly at the other two children in the room, inflicting horror-movie injuries.

While his mom screamed, “How can you be doing this? I didn’t raise you like this!” Josh raised the cutter over his head. I snatched it from his hands and set if behind me. As Josh sunk into a chair, The Vice Principal and I began talking softly to him. “It’s going to be okay, Josh,” we said over and over. “Calm down; just breath; we can start making this better now. You’re going to be okay.”

Security entered the room to see Josh sitting calmly in a chair, head in his hands, crying. The Vice Principal and I were still talking calmly to Josh, thinking that the worst was over and that we were on the road to recovery. Our attendance officer was calming mom down. The police had been called and were on the way.

Josh calmly got up. Reentered the inner office. We thought he was moving to shake off some of his adrenaline, but we were wrong. Instead, he exploded again. He swept the coffee maker from the table, smashing it against a bookcase. He tore the printer off of the desk and threw it to the ground. When on of the security guards and I grabbed him, he leapt into the air and kicked the desk lamp, crushing it against the wall.

Another security officer joined the two of us in wrestling Josh to the ground. “Let me up!” he shouted. “No.” three of us replied. We got a handcuff onto on wrist, turned him over, and cuffed his other hand behind his back.

“Ring!” went the bell; and I had to leave to teach my classes.

Later in the day, I found out that Josh continued his violent outbursts until the ambulance arrived. It finally took seven adults to strap Josh onto the gurney for the ride to the hospital. This had not been the first time he had been admitted because he posed a danger to himself and others. “It’s been like this every time he looses his temper,” mom explained, surveying the destruction. “My house looks just like this.” Later, we found out that Josh had been severely beaten since early childhood. His father is currently serving time for the abuse.

Days later, once I finally got over the shock, I began to wonder about Josh; about his childhood; about his illness. I wonder what his test scores are going to look like this year. I wonder how his teachers might be evaluated if the school used Josh’s tests scores for the Value-Added Measure. I wonder what the so-called reformers would say if they had been in the room with Josh instead of me. Would they still claim that poverty, or living in violent neighborhoods is no “excuse” and that a great teacher could compensate for Josh’s circumstances and help Josh succeed on the high-stakes test? Would they disagree with me when I think that Josh has bigger issues to deal with this year than the Pythagorean theorem?

I can’t help but wonder: WWRD? What Would Rhee Do?

Of Course Money Doesn't Matter in Education

2011-01-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

Forget the fact that:

Oakland Public Schools spend $4,945 per student, and
Secular Private Schools spend on average $20,100 per student, and
California spends $224,712 per child in juvenile detention.

Nothing to see here. Move along.... move along...

(Oakland Public Schools and California Juvenile Detention numbers from Harper's Index, November 2010; Secular Private Schools average a Washington Post article, "Per Student Spending Gaps Wider Thank Know, August 2009)

Subversive Teaching and Jewish Vampires

2011-01-05T07:59:00.000-08:00

Teachers know their kids better than anyone else in the education system. They know what academic strengths and needs each student has. They know where their interest lies and how to bridge student curiosity to academic goals in order to make learning meaningful and fun.

When teachers receive guidance from above, from site or district administration or from state and federal governments, they embrace this guidance if it meets two conditions. First, the guidance needs to be congruent with what the teachers know is in the best interest of their children. Second, the guidance needs to allow for teachers to be flexible and creative, engaging their students in meaningful learning and igniting their passions and their sense of wonder.

“Mr. Orphal,” a fourteen-year-old freshmen began. “What if a Jewish person turned into a vampire? Would that vampire be afraid of a Star of David like regular vampires are afraid of a cross?” That question launched a ten-minute conversation about the concept of vampires in legend and their use as a literary device, so popular in modern novels, television and film. We talked about the purpose of vampires in 18^th century literature as monsters that story-heroes can fight and defeat. We talked about the evolution of vampires into darkly sexual creatures, and eventually into social outcasts trying to fit in with everyone else.

The conversation ended with me encouraging the student to write that story. As the author, he could decide how the non-Christian vampire would react to religious iconography. Through his story, he could explore his thinking about religion and the nature of God.

A short story like this would be a wonderfully entertaining way to assess this boy’s current mastery of language. What vocabulary would he choose to use? How would he describe the setting of the story? Who would be the protagonist? What perspective would he use? How would he use grammar and diction to make his story compelling? We could even look at his spelling and his editing choices.

A short story like this would also be a great way to examine his ideas and his critical thinking skills. What choices would he make about his Jewish vampire? Would he choose to affirm an exclusive rightness for Christianity, keeping with traditional notions of vampires and crosses? Would the Jewish vampire cringe at a Star of David? If the vampire did fear Jewish religious symbols, what would this mean? Would this mean that he had shifted exclusive validity from Christianity, as in many traditional vampire stories? Alternatively, would he choose to explore an idea of morality and universal goodness where Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim vampires would cringe at symbols from the religions of their previous cultures? Would these vampires even try to negotiate their current undead reality in light of a religious morality the characters were trying to maintain? Each idea becomes an intriguing path to deep and critical thought.

Unfortunately, I doubt this student’s English teacher will be more than superficially supportive of his idea. This should not be read to cast blame and shame at his teacher. Rather, this should be seen as an example of how teachers, especially teachers of English and mathematics, are hand-tied by the need for their students to score well on up-coming high-stakes tests.

It takes a subversive teacher to engage in such meaningful and fun learning these days. A teacher would need the courage to forgo her district and state mandates to allow this child to explore his ideas. A subversive teacher may be able to treat district mandates as a sort of “paper work game” as Linda Darling-Hammond describes in The Right to Learn. In her book, she quotes one such teacher, “A lot of the goals of the school district can be taken care of by putting some words on paper and then going ahead and doing the things the way you want to.”

Current education reforms such as former DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee would tend to argue the words of the above-quoted teacher, but not the intent. She would say that accountability guidelines are meant to give good teachers exactly the kind of flexibility I describe in this essay and reflected in the teacher’s statement. She would say that great teachers do exactly this; they use frameworks to build rigorous, engaging learning experiences for their children.

Where her argument runs off the rails is the moment the high-stakes tests come into play. Creative writing, deep thinking, and wonder are not assessed on any of the current testing tools, and they are unlikely to be so in the next generation of assessments currently being designed. This is because deep thinking and creativity are really hard to test. Instead, current exams measure low-level sub-skills that translate well to bubble-in-the-answer questions. They look at questions where there is one right answer that can be hidden among three red herrings.

Unfortunately, it will be the score on such a test that will be used to judge the student, teacher, and school. The student’s score, compared to what Value-Added statisticians imagine he would have scored with an “average teacher,” will be used to label his teacher as effective or not. If Ms. Rhee has her way, this score would then be used to decide whether or not the teacher remains in the classroom. Under such pressure, it is hard to imagine a non-subversive teacher allowing hours to be spent exploring vampirism in non-Christian communities.

This is too bad. I wish Ms. Rhee and other reformers would be willing to read some essays by this child from last year and then read the story of the Jewish vampire. I can imagine these pieces of data would point to some great learning on the part of the student and some great teaching on the part of his teacher.

Until then, so-called reformers will continue to point at test numbers. They’ll do so because test numbers are easy to point at, not because they even remotely reflect the totality of so complex a process as learning. The story of the Jewish vampire will have to wait until after school.

The Factory Model of Education Reform

2011-01-04T07:22:00.001-08:00

The current education reform movement is based on the factory model. In that model there are a few at the top of the organization who are the thinkers and the planners. The rest of us are unskilled workers, expected to obey the mandates from on high and implement the plans from our bosses. As Fredrick Taylro said in 1911 and quoted from Darling-Hammond’s 1997 The Right to Learn, “One type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work.”

In the education reform movement, the one type who plans ahead are the men and women in administrative positions, far away from the students. They are the politicians, the state and local superintendants of education, the policy wonks located in foundations and think tanks. Teachers are treated as the uneducated workers who are expected to “execute” the reforms faithfully, unquestioningly and thoroughly.

A part of the problem in the education reform movement is the seemingly hypercritical nature of reform. Simply put, our actions do not match our rhetoric.

We talk about how much money is spent in education in general and spent on personnel in particular. We assume that this money is spent on classroom teachers, ignoring the reality that nearly half of school employees are not in contact with students on a daily basis. Instead, these employees are busy filling out the accountability forms, ensuring that teachers are, in fact, doing more with less. Current educational reformers want the public to think that public school teachers are becoming wildly rich over the course of their careers, ignoring the reality that the average public-school teacher makes only $55,000 a year. So-called reformers have even been brazen enough to compare teacher retirement programs to the multi-million dollar golden parachutes of corporate leaders.

We talk about how they want kids to deeply understand mathematical principals, but the tests that we use to determine if this is happening cover only low-level sub skills that are easy to test. We say that we want kids to write and to appreciate great literature, but schools are held accountable on how well students can identify the definition of a word or edit basic grammar. We say that we want kids to explore historical trends and themes, but we test them on memorized facts. We say we want them to experiment, but test them on memorized science facts. We say we want them to become decent human beings, but play time and learning experiences about acceptance and conflict solution aren’t on any tests and consequently are deemed unimportant, cut first in hard economic times, and sacrificed on the alter of ever-higher test scores.

Even when it comes to our academic standards, we seem to have a split personality. The new Common Core Standards look great on paper. Classroom teachers who have studied these new standards are typically hopeful, seeing how their classrooms would return to exploration, experimentation and authentic learning as they meet these standards. The problem is that the several state standards that the Common Core are replacing look good on paper as well.

The problem is the tests that we use to assess the standards and the tremendous import we place on the scores on these tests.

Even the most pro-test educational reformer admits that the tests are flawed, assess only low-level skills, and give only a snapshot of student performance. Despite this acknowledgement, pro-test reformers want to ascribe even more import to the scores. They want teachers ranked based on these scores. They want schools graded on these scores. They want public education judged on these scores. “They are not perfect, but they are all we have,” say some reformers, painting a picture that the test scores are near perfect rather than near catastrophic. The analogy isn’t pouring sand on a fire for lack of water; it is more like using gasoline.

The crucial work about the Common Core Standards is happening right now. Two consortiums of states are designing the assessments that will be used to judge student, teacher, and school success on the Common Core Standards.

The rhetoric surrounding the next-generation assessments is hopeful. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that the next generation of tests should not be fill-in-the-bubble based. The consortiums are placing a lot of hope in emerging technologies that may be able to marry the speed and cost-effectiveness of scan-tron assessments and the need to assess essays and projects.

I am wary. Perhaps the next-generation assessments will be significantly better than the last generation. Perhaps, the assessments will look at skills more complex than memorization of facts and procedures. Unfortunately, the desire to ascribe great import to the next series of test scores look to be even greater than kids are currently expecting.

I imagine that a decade from now, English teachers will decry how student essays are locked into the formula and patter that the computerized essay scorer recognizes as proficient.

Unfortunately, I am confident that classroom teachers will have very little influence over the look of the new assessment and the new curriculum that will be designed to meet the Common Core Standards. Teachers are not the “type of man is needed to plan ahead,” but considered by so-called reformers to be the “entirely different type to execute the work.”

Some thoughts on seniority...

2010-12-28T19:01:00.000-08:00

I recently read an AP story about a study by the University of Washington’s Center for Education Data & Research. Researchers concluded that seniority-based layoff policies were likely to have negative consequences for students.

Seniority-based systems make sense.

How many years have you been a professional? Would you not say that you are better today than you were when you began your career? Wouldn’t you say that experience and professional development have been the two major reasons why you are a better professional today than you were when you began your career? Couldn’t most of us say the same thing?

Seniority rules make sense because everyone gets better at their profession as they gain experience and wisdom.

Seniority rules are in place because, when an organization needs to reduce it’s work force, the organization should retain the most experienced professionals.

Seniority rules also came into being because of some corrupt principals.

Unprincipled principals once abused their arbitrary power to lay-off teachers. Sometimes they let go of teachers who came out of the closet, asked too many awkward questions at meetings, held contrary political opinions, or refused sexual advances.

If unchecked power to fire and lay-off teachers were returned, some principals may be sorely tempted to lay-off 15- and 20-year veterans, without a thought of their effectiveness in the classroom, knowing that they can roll the dice on a fresh-faced college grad. The new hire may be good, or s/he may be bad, but either way, s/he be half the cost of the veteran, quite an easy solution to annually shrinking budgets.

Even if the principal at a large high school were to spend EVERY DAY visiting classrooms and watching his teachers, with over 100 professionals to visit, she would not be able to spend more than a day and a half with each teacher. She could not begin to make informed judgments about the quality of each and every teacher. It is unreasonable to expect her to make informed decisions about who to lay off, if seniority rules were suddenly stripped away.

One may counter, “That’s why we need objective test scores to tell us which teachers are effective and which are not.” The problem with the test-score worshippers is their unwillingness to consider the mountains of studies and research that have been telling us for decades that standardized tests only inform us about low-level thinking and basic fact memorization and none of the skills that most folks would equate to the word “educated.” Children who do tremendously well on these tests often flounder when asked to apply their memorized facts to answer a complex question or to show multiple ways to solve a problem.

All of this said, there are some teachers who should consider moving on to other professions. Everyone has an opinion on this, and every person I know can name a teacher that she or he knows who is a “bad teacher.” Heck… some of my colleagues or former students may even think of my name as an example of a “bad teacher.”

It should be easier to remove incompetent teachers from their classroom duties. However, whatever the next generation teacher evaluation system look likes, it must be both reasonable for school districts and fair for teachers.

Until that day, I prefer to keep lay-off decisions based on seniority. That way, at least I know that when lay-offs come, our most experienced professionals will remain in the classroom serving their students.

What do you think? Should schools continue to use seniority to decide which teachers are laid off? Should teachers be ranked as effective based on the scores their children get on the standardized tests and lay-off determined by those rankings?

Clinical vs. Theoretical? Yes, both.

2010-11-18T04:52:00.000-08:00

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education issued a report this week arguing that teacher preparation programs, who have been traditionally heavy on theory and lighter on in-class internships should turn this model on it's head. The recommendation is for the majority of a pre-service teacher to spend many more hours with a mentor teacher in a public school and far less time in their university classes.

I don’t think needs to be turned on its head. I think it needs to be expanded. Part of being an educator is being a scholar. We should be scholars of our fields (history, science, language, mathematics, art, etc…) and we should be scholars of educational theory, philosophy, and pedagogy. Reducing the number of classroom hours in order to increase the number of at-school hours is misguided and will result in a further deskilling of teachers that will eventually turn us from professionals to administrators of curriculum.

At the same time, some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have been at my schools where no university experience could have prepared me. When I began teaching fifteen years ago, I frankly expected to eventually mourn the death of a student. My own high school graduating class mourned the loss of three of our fellows to drinking and driving. When I heard on the 3rd of January that Ryan was dead, I was shocked but ready to handle the grieving I expected my classes would be experiencing. When I learned that he had been gunned down in front of his girlfriend and baby daughter by another teenager who mistook him for someone else, I was too shocked to cope effectively with the day.

What I am most concerned with proposals like NCATE’s proposed reforms is that these reforms are being born at the close of the NCLB era but before the functional birth of the Common Core Standards’s era.

Perhaps NCLB’s most damaging legacy is the decade long process of redefining the concept of “good schools” into a number of a fill-in-the-blank test. As this era sunsets, we are experiencing strong efforts to redefine “good teaching” and the behaviors that teachers can do that result in high scores on fill-in-the-black tests. I sincerely hope that NCLB does not succeed in redefining “well-educated person” as a high score on a fill-in-the-blank test.

I understand how emotionally satisfying it is for most people to look at one simple number and infer from it a judgement on a very complex system. It’s easy and satisfying to see a test score going up and think “good school,” “good teachers,” “well-educated children.”

We get the same feelings from watching the Stock Market go up or the stock values of a company go up. Stock up equals successful company. Stocks down equals failing company.

I want to remind each of us that Toyota’s stocks were climbing while they were making cars that would have unintended acceleration problems that caused dozens of deaths and injuries. BP’s stocks were going up right before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Lehman Brothers’s stock was going up right before the bubble burst.

Our very best education experts tell a similar tale for schools. Rising scores on standardized tests are actually in indication of deep problems at a school and not improvement. This is because high scores on tests like the CST and the High School Exit Exam reflect superficial memorization of facts rather than deep complex thinking.

I get worried thinking that California’s teacher preparation programs may begin training a new generation of teachers to very good at the failing practices and processes of the last century.

I may be wrong, NCATE’s recommendations may in fact be dove-tailed in with the new Common Core Standards and the new generation of authentic assessments being presently designed for use in 2014. I certainly hope it is.

Formative Teacher Evaluations

2010-11-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

I wonder what it might look like if we had "Formative Teacher Evaluations."

It's not the evaluation itself that feels like a game of gotcha, it's the high-stakes that are attached. When evaluations are used to make staffing decisions like retention and dismissal, then teachers become interested in "getting through" the evaluation process. I've heard stories about how teachers would behave complete different on a day when they know that they are going to be visited than on a typical day.

Most teachers have never left the education system. It's important to remember this. What does this mean? How is the education system different than the worlds of science or business? How does this culture affect teacher evaluation and school reform?

The education system is a universe populated correct answers. The correct answers live in the teacher's edition of the text, in the teacher's mind, or at the feedback end of an exam or product. In the science and science and business universe, there are right answers too, but in these spaces, right answers are the tools that we use to find the answers that no one knows.

Teachers who have never left the educational universe continue to look at their work through these lenses. First, there is an authority whose supposed to know the right answer (the administrator, the District, the State). Currently, observations and evaluations are like tests and quizzes for the teacher. Some teachers do habitually well on these assessments; these teachers are not worried about evaluations. Some teachers do poorly.

Just like in school, it's the ones who do poorly who have captured our attention. We can see parallels between a teacher who has done poorly on an evaluation and a student who has done poorly on an exam.

Perhaps they will see the failure as a function of their actions. "I didn't study as well as I should have," says the student. "I didn't plan enough material for the period, and I didn't have any systems in place to use the last 10 minutes of class effectively," says the teacher.

Perhaps they will see the failure as a function of their personalities. "I'm just not smart. I'm going to drop out," says the student. "I'm not a good teacher; I need to find another profession," says the teacher.

Perhaps they will try to escape the shame of failure by shifting the blame away from them or their behavior. "The teacher doesn't explain the subject well," says the student. "The principal couldn't do any better; and these kids would behave if there were real consequences to their behavior," says the teacher.

What if teacher evaluations, and for that matter student assessments, formative in nature? We have been actively looking at shifting classroom culture away from summative assessments. We've been actively trying to deal with the student in my above examples; we try to use the assessments not as motivators or judgments of behaviors, but as feedback for the teacher and students together.

When teachers use formative assessments in the classroom, the focus moves away from what a student did right or wrong. Instead, the formative assessment tells the teacher and the student what each should do next. The student failed the section on dividing fractions. This means that the teacher needs to find some time to sit down with the students and explain this concept a different way. It also means that the teacher may need to design a new learning experience that will help the student learn the concept. This same formative assessment tells the student that s/he needs to find some additional time learning about dividing fractions. It tells the student that s/he needs to be open and willing to try the new learning experience and try to learn the concept a second time.

A poor teacher observation could work the same way. The principal walked into my class during the last 10 minutes and saw children chatting, off task, and wandering the room. This tells the principal that I need some more training on planning lessons to take the entire class period, and/or that I need some fresh ideas for 10-minute soak activities for my subject matter that would look fun for kids while being instructional. This same observation tells me the same information.

Teacher observations and student outcome data can and should be used to drive the professional development for departments, small learning communities, and schools. PD time and activities can and should be focused on the current needs of teachers, with schools and districts allowing for multiple groups of teachers to be working on different types of PD in parallel; call this differentiated PD.

For pre-service and 1st - 3rd year teachers, the data of teacher formative assessment should also go back to the teacher-training program they came from to help guide the evolution of their practice. The results of their teacher observations, student outcome data, and teacher reflections on the PD that they have gone to as a results of this data should all go back to the university, TfA, OTF, or where ever.

Turning teacher observations and student outcome data into formative assessments for teachers have positive outcomes:

1. Teachers will feel less threatened by the observations and data.

2. It will build a culture of trust between administrators and teachers since both sides are actively trying to use these tools to help teachers get better.

3. It will inform our teacher credential programs how they can evolve and improve

Someday, down the road, we may find ourselves in a place where a teacher should be let go, because even after multiple attempts with PD and training, they are still not performing. This is still going to be a difficult time for the teacher and the administrator. Just like in the classroom, there might still be a time when after all of the formative assessments and interventions, the child still fails the class or still is suspended or expelled for his/her behavior. Using formative assessments in the classroom wont make this go away. Likewise, teacher formative assessments wont remove the problem of having to fire a teacher.

NYC Forgoes following the LA Times in Publishing Value-added Rankings of Teachers

2010-10-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

Today, the NYC public schools said they would not give value-added data and teacher rankings to several media outlets. I am glad they chose not to.

At first blush, most folks seem to like the idea of the “Value-added” system of teacher evaluation. It seems intuitively satisfying to think of a system that can rule out the many non-academic issues, school-wide issues, societal issues that children walk into class with like a loaded backpack. With “Value-added” we seem to think we’ve got a system that will isolate the contribution to a students education caused only by her/his teacher. Before choosing to not offer the data, a NYC Education Department spokesperson defended the earlier position by saying that the department, “believes that the Value-added model is an accurate evaluation of teachers.”

“Believe” is a really good word to use. Folks seem to believe in the value-added model because the rhetoric feels so gosh darn solid.

The science of value-added looks a lot different. Just yesterday, the Annenberg Institute released a report detailing the chimera-like realities of the Value-added model.

1. The quality of the teacher is the most significant factor that school’s can control in a child’s education. The quality of the teacher, and all other factors in a school’s control are actually quite small. The research actually points to teacher quality being only 10-20% of a child’s overall education. Family, poverty, and community factors are still more significant.

2. The test scores that the Value-added model is based are highly suspect. Even at their very best, they only measure a tiny sub-set of all of the things we hope children learn in school. Economist Alan Blinder argued in 2009 that the skills vital for success in the labor market in the near future, such as “Creativity, inventiveness, spontaneity, flexibility and interpersonal relations” will be those least amenable to standardized testing.

3. Value-added is grading teachers on a curve. It is, by design, a system that ranks teachers. By design, 50% of all teachers will rank “Average.” By design, another 20% will be labeled “Below Average” and another 20%, “Above Average.” The top 5% will be called, “Excellent,” while the bottom 5% will be labeled “Failures.” It will always look this way, no matter how many “Failures” we fire. There will always be the worst 5%. A district or school’s dream of having all “Excellent” teachers is impossible to achieve.

“The promise that value-added systems can provide such a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is not supported by the data,” concludes the Annenberg report, “Moreover, the set of skills that can be adequately assessed in a manner appropriate for value-added assessments represents a small fraction of the goals our nation has set out for our students and schools.”

Why Teachers Leave Our Profession: Parents

2010-10-16T08:42:00.001-07:00

“Why did my daughter get in trouble for needing to go to the bathroom?” asked the angry voice on the other side of the phone. We had no salutation, no small talk, no wishes for a pleasant start to one another’s day. We had my self-identification, then her accusation-question.

“Do you believe that your daughter got in trouble for needing to go to the bathroom?” I replied.

“That is what she told me!” she shouted. Coming through the line, I could imagine hearing her own stories from the first eighteen years of her life. I knew from her daughter that mom was a former student at the very continuation high school now attended by her daughter, the topic of our conversation. I could feel the weight of her experiences with public schools. They were not places of learning. They were not places of curiosity, or investigation. For her, they had been places where conformity and obedience were the values of the institution. For her, they had been places were punishments and rewards were used to cajole and force children into compliance. For her, they were places where nails that stuck out were hammered down. I could hear her frustration, anger and fear. Her daughter was now the latest victim of that same system. Teachers and principals were now unfairly picking on her daughter. For crying our loud, she had only needed to go to the bathroom.

“I believe that is what she told you.” I replied, the smile on my face reflected in my tone. “That wasn’t my question. My questions was, ‘Do you believe your daughter when she tells you that she got into trouble for needing to go to the bathroom?’.” This question caused a long pause and the parent reflected on her question, her daughter’s claim, and the lack of logic therein.

“Well, what is your side of the story?” she asked.

“Your daughter came into class ten minutes late, chatting with a friend of hers who is not enrolled in my class.” I began. “It took me another five minutes to get the friend out of class and heading back to her own. As soon as the friend left, your daughter shouted, ‘I need to go to the bathroom!’ Frankly, I didn’t believe her, but hey, coincidence happens, so I said, ‘Wait five minutes for your friend to find her way back to her class, then you can go to the bathroom.’ You daughter then stormed out of class, slamming the door behind her. This is why she is in trouble.”

“She didn’t tell me any of that.”

“I believe you when you say she didn’t.”

Parents love their children. They will protect them with all of the ferocity of a mama bear protects her cub. This is the right and natural order of things. Teachers who do not already know this, will learn it soon.

Children lie. Frankly, we all do, but children want to have fun and, when caught, they would like to avoid trouble. Getting away with a lie is a wonderful way to avoid trouble. Teachers and parents who don't know this, need to learn it. Like yesterday!

I’ve been really blessed with all of the wonderful parents whom I am in contact with at Skyline High School. I think our Advisory system is a contributing factor in that. Instead of feeling responsible for all one-hundred and thirty children I teach in a day, I, their English, biology, and math teachers all share the one-hundred-thirty and we each take responsibility to mentor about thirty-five of them. Since I only have thirty-five families to call and talk to, I have the time to actually build relationships with my children’s’ parents before there is trouble.

But I have heard stories… The story above, where mom believed her daughter’s story is not unusual. Our school has plenty of children who are experiencing their own personal wars against conformity, butting heads with teachers and administration. Many of these children have parents who butted heads with teachers and vice principals in their own days. I’ve heard plenty of stories of parents who readily believe any lie their children tell them; who think that teachers are “out to get” their children, just like they were “out to get” them a generation ago.

I have heard stories of parents badgering and bullying teachers until a grade was changed or a consequence for behavior dropped. I heard of parents, grown adults, charging into classrooms looking to fight the 14 year old child who was bullying their baby.

I seen parents come to school high, to defend their child’s use of marijuana.

Perhaps the saddest, were the parents who made their child re-enroll in school every four months or so, to stave off the cancellation of their SSI check. After three or four days of attendance, the child would disappear and the parents would be unresponsive to our efforts to contact them. We wouldn’t see them for four months or so, when the SSI was threatened again.

Let me be crystal clear about this: 90% of the parents I have had contact with over the past 14 years are WONDERFUL! They are looking out for their child and realize that the teachers are too.

But that 10%... they can drive me crazy, and at the end of the day, when I’m telling stories, it’s the 10% who seem to take up all my time.

Tune in tomorrow, when our intrepid teacher takes on his own colleagues.....

Why Teachers Leave Our Profession: Non-Academic Student Needs

2010-10-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

Last year at Skyline High School, our beloved senior, Eric, was murdered while celebrating his eighteenth birthday.

Years ago, in another school and another city, I am wakened by a 3AM Sunday phone call from a mom. Her son, my student, was dead, killed by his own hand.

I called a student’s mom to talk about where the child might be, since he hasn’t been coming to class. He’s a runaway, who, for want of some 14-year-old’s idea of freedom has been running to the homes of a friend whose parent is addicted to drugs, his friend’s parent, “Doesn’t care what I do,” the child told his own mother as an explanation to why he had run. He thought his mother’s idea of school, and chores, and homework was “unfair” and preferred the lassie-faire attitude of the friend’s parent.

Another student comes into class crying because the boy she “likes” is seeing another girl.

A different year and a different girl, and that time the love triangle ends with violence.

Another child, who isn’t coming to my class, is caught smoking cigarettes, and in possession of crack cocaine.

Another child, and another school in another city confides in me that she has been selling herself for meth.

Another child, a few years ago, is cutting my class, wandering the hills behind our school, and finds the skeletal remains of a child who had gone missing a year before.

I tell you these stories not in some curmudgeonly way of shaking my virtual fist in impotent rage and type… “Kids these Days!”

Quite on the contrary, I love each and every one of the children whose stories I told above. When we could, the parents, administrators, and I spent hours trying to help the child make the situation better. The times we couldn't, we held each other and cried over our loss. They are my kids. They are my classroom “sons” and “daughters.” They and their parents know I’ve got their backs – even if that means I am riding them to do better.

I tell you these stories to shine a light on some of the non-academic issues facing our children. These stories are from Oakland, and the suburbs and the country. None of them have to do with why Germany and Italy turn to fascism after the Great Depression, nor do they have anything to do with the three branches of government. These stories are not the topics I was planning of working on when I chose to enter the teaching profession fifteen years ago.

My point is this – teacher-training programs do not prepare candidates for the mountain of non-academic issues that children bring with them to school each day. The situation is even more extreme in our neediest schools, where many new teachers start, and too quickly end, their careers.

Can you blame them when they quit after only one or two years? They aren’t ready for the headache and the heartache of the stories I detailed above. Would you do better? If you think so, I am sure Skyline is going to have some openings this June and we’d love to have you join are team and help us make a positive impact in our children’s lives.

Tune in tomorrow, when our intrepid teacher tackles the "third rail of teaching".... parents.

Why do great teachers leave our profession? There are several reasons:

2010-10-14T08:03:00.001-07:00

High-stakes testing: First introduced as a way to measure the quality of education at schools, test scores have now become the educational goal at far too many schools.

What do these bubble-in-the-answer-test actually measure? At their very best, they measure a child’s ability to identify a correct answer from a group of red-herrings. Critical thinking, writing, analyzing, connecting, and using information in real-world ways; these skills are being pushed out in favor or low skilled, drill and memorize test prep. Teachers enter our profession saying things like, “I want to teach children to read and love literature”, “I want to help children speak a foreign language”, “I want to watch children experiment with science and explore their world.” No one every says, “I want to help children score higher on state-mandated tests.”

Unfortunately, that is what they are being asked to do. Ten years ago, my then principal said, “Don’t worry about the tests. We will never teach to the tests. We teach our curriculum and the tests will take care of themselves.” Five years later a different principal said, “This is not the cruise we signed up for. But it is the cruise we’re on.” Then, just last week, my principal said, “You know what your PowerStandards are. The state has told us. We know exactly how many test items apply to each standard. The state has told us. Those are the standards you should make sure to do a great job on. Don’t worry about the others. Now I know what some of you teachers are going to say, ‘Does that mean I am teaching to the tests?’ Yeah. You are.”

In just ten years, I seen the progression from “We will never teach to the tests” to teaching to the tests. I’ve seen dozens of self-styled educational experts come to my district with strategies and tools that are “research driven and shown to be effective.” Which really means, these techniques raise tests scores. I’ve seen teachers labeled ineffective because of chronically low test scores and other labeled effective because of high test scores.

I haven’t seen a teacher labeled great because her students can write creative essays or his students can research an excellent paper, or her students can conduct an outstanding experiment, or his students demonstrate the curiosity to ask questions and show the skills to find answers. Lately, it’s been all about test scores.

I haven’t seen anyone ask the question, “At what costs?” Sure this technique may raise test scores, but at what costs? Sure this teacher has gotten her students test scores up, but at what costs? Sure this school have great test scores, but at what costs?

If test scores go up, but children do not remember what they have been taught, are we really better off? If test scores go up, but children’s curiosity is lost, are we really better off? If tests scores go up, but children learn that learning is memorizing facts for a test, are we really better off? If we train a whole generation of people with amazing skills at finding a correct answer from a group of red herrings, are we really better off?

A future manager at Apple may ask this future engineer for a creative idea for the next iWhatever. That engineer, with years of high-test scores behind her may say, “I can’t think of anything new or creative. But if you put the correct answer here with three or four incorrect ones, I will totally spot the correct one.” Are we really better off?

Tomorrow, tune in again, when our intrepid teacher comments about the harrowing adventures of new teachers in Non-Academic Needs Land!!!!!!!

The High Stakes of High-stakes Testing

2010-10-09T10:32:00.003-07:00

When did we loose the fight over test scores? When did good schools get re-defined as school that score high on the test? When did good teachers get redefined as teachers whose kids got high scores on the test? When did learning get redefined as the ability to spot the right answer from amid three red herrings?

Imagine a world that worked like this:

Manager to Engineer at Apple, "Hey, we need a new idea for the iPad." Engineer, "I can't do that, but if you put a new idea mixed in with three old ideas, I can totally spot the new one."

Patient to Doctor, "I need a diagnosis for my illness." Doctor, "I can't do that, but if you go hide in that group of well people, I can totally spot you."

How important, really, is the skill to recognize a right answer from a group of red herrings? As the all-judging testing advocates seem to think, this is a hugely important skill.

It's NOT. It's just a really, really easy way to see if kids know a fact. We've got lots and lots of ways to see if kids know a fact. Can they use that fact in an essay? Can they use that fact to build a project? Can the use that fact in a performance? The problem is that assessing the child's mastery of the fact while looking at the project, essay, or performance is time and money consuming.

I understand why these tests are here. People have lost faith in us as professionals. Too many kids in the 1980's and 1990's were graduating from high school illiterate. But we really can find a better way to look over the teacher's shoulder and see if they are doing a good job. Testing isn't a good way.

A business friend of mine once said that in any business solution you've got "fast," "cheap" and "good" - pick two.

In assessing if kids are learning we've got "comprehensive (meaning looking at every single child)", "cheap", and "good" - pick two.

Right now, we've picked "comprehensive" and "cheap." I think we need to think again.

The triumvirate of so-called school reform

2010-10-09T09:44:00.001-07:00

The triumvirate of so-called school reform: Testing, Accountability, Market-Driven School Choice.

These are not ideas to fix schools. In fact, they are ideas that have nothing to do with education. They are the ultimate do-nothing solution.

Testing – is Monday morning quarterbacking. After the year is long over and teachers can do nothing to help a child re-learn concepts that she didn’t get, pundits look at the test scores and say… “yep, you didn’t do so well.” It’s like a fan telling the quarterback he shouldn’t have thrown left cause the ball got intercepted. Easy call – after the play is over.

Accountability – “Shame on you for not doing well with last years children. You better do better this year, or else…” The next set of kids walk in the door with entirely new needs and skills. They bear no relation to the kids who have left the past June. Sure, if we take the average for the city or the nation, we see similarities, but those averages mean nothing when one teacher looks at 32 new shiny faces. It’s like that same football fan assuming that next weeks opponent will be just like last week’s.

Market-Driven School Choice – “Let’s that group, or that person open a charter school. If she or he has a better idea, then parents/customers will flock there, if not, then that school will fail and close.” Here politicians and pundits really show their colors. THEY DON’T HAVE ANY IDEA AS TO HOW TO FIX THE PERFORMANCE GAP OR IMPORVE EDUCCATION OR EVEN RAISE TEST SCORES; THEY WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT FOR THEM.

That’s their plan – do nothing. No knew idea. No help. Just Monday morning quarterback, shame and blame, and wait for someone else to solve the problem for them.

That’s their big idea. That’s what they think Public Education Reform looks like.

I wish I could get paid big bucks to stand on the sideline, tell the ones who are really working what they’re doing wrong after it is too late to fix anything and after it is obvious to anyone with eyes that something went wrong; wag my finger at them, and hope someone else comes up with a better idea…

No wait. I don’t want that job. I’ve got too much self-respect and too much love for kids. I think I’ll stick with trying to actually make public education better.

7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College

2010-10-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College

Wired Magazine recently published a fascinating feature about potential classes for digital-age students.

"It's the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft and essay, and derive a slope of a tangent isn't enough anymore," the article begins. Notice first, this article isn't dismissing traditional skills that will continue to be important for the next few generations. Despite the break-neck speeds by which technology is changing the art of communication, reading, writing, and mathematics will remain important skills. However, new skills such as knowing, "how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie," will soon join the traditional "R's" as essential for tomorrow/today's workplace.

Imagined courses at Wired University include the following:

Statistical Literacy: "We are now 53 percent more likely than our parents to trust polls of dubious merit. (that figure is totally made up. See?)" quips this class prospectus.

Post-State Diplomacy: In a world where nation-states must negotiate with non-state agencies, terrorist organizations and multi-national corporations who utilize the internet for recruitment and propagation of their agendas, national governments will need to learn how to create and share a counter narrative promoting the values and interest of their state while encouraging these non-state to engage in peaceful dialogue to resolve conflict.

Remix Culture: the Digital Generation is just as engrossed with remixed and mashed-up forms of art as they are in creating new forms of art. While using past influences are noting new, the Flintstones are simply the Honeymooners drawn in an imaginary pre-historic world, the Dig-Gen are more overt in using pre-exisiting film, music and text to share new ideas and new interpretations of old ideas.

Applied Cognition: Digital Age children are learning in ways vastly different than Boomers or Gen-X'ers did. Learning how the brain works will offer insight to both teachers of the next generation who want to be for effective with their students' learning, and with Dig-Gen'ers themselves who want to be more effective in managing their own learning.

Writing for New Forms: How can students craft a effective message in 140 characters for Twitter, an essay for their blog, or an expanded idea for their e-book? How will they mix media, text, links, images, music, or film for their enhanced e-book or website?

Waste Studies: Not only are oil, electricity, and consumer products finite resources and problematic waste, but so is our time and intellectual power. Learning how to manage our waste will make us "smarter consumers, investors, and conservers."

Domestic Tech: "We lost touch with the act of making, repairing, and upgrading physical objects," and our throw-away society is rapidly becoming untenable.

What do you think? Are these imagined classes going to be important for the next generation's course of study? Are there classes that Wired didn't imagine that should become a part of the next generation's course catalogue?

LA teacher received top evaluation before suicide

2010-09-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

LA teacher received top evaluation before suicide

A Los Angeles Unified School District official says Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a teacher who committed suicide last week, had received a very good performance evaluation.

So what does this mean?

Some people in the educational reform movement are going to see this as evidence that the teacher-evaluation system is broken. They might say that teachers are always on their very best behavior when the principal is in the room watching. They might say that this proves that teachers know how to be effective, but are too lazy to do that quality of instruction each and every day like our children deserve. For them, this is will be proof positive that teacher evaluations have to be tied to objective measures of student performance, in other words, test scores.

Other people in the educational reform movement will look at this and see evidence that the tests are flawed. They will say that learning and teachers are far too complicated activities to be measured by a one-shot-bubble-in test. They'll say that some children get frighted by high-stakes test and do more poorly that they could have because of test anxiety. They might also point out that only a few apathetic and angry children bubbling at random will greatly effect a classes, and thus a teachers, score. For them, this will be proof positive that high-stakes test are giving us a misguided view of classrooms and student learning.

While I hesitate to play judge and tell you who is right... I do suspect that neither side will be much interested in listening to the other.

Can We Test for "Joy of Learning"

2010-09-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

I was reading Jonathan Kozol's Letters to a Young Teacher and came across this quote:

Do the officials "... who's setting education policy policy these days every speaks about the sense of fun that children have, or ought to have, in public school or the excitement that they take when they examine interesting creatures such as beetle-bugs and ladybugs and other oddities of nature that they come upon - or even merely whether they are happy children and enjoy the hours that they spend with us in school."

Is there anyone out there who is designing an assessment about the joy of learning? Are there policy makers or pundits who even care about this? If kids are getting higher test scores and are learning that school is boring, should we call that a win?

In his book, Meeting Students Where They Live, Richard Curwin asks a similar question. He thinks that educators should be asking the question, "At what costs?" more often when confronted with the newest reform trend. Sure, this instructional program or classroom management technique may result in higher test scores, but at what costs?

When a child, or young adult, feels joy in learning; when her curiosity is fed, she will remain motivated to learn for years after he formal education is over. But is school becomes drudgery, then the desire to learn may shut down as soon as the goal, the grade or diploma, is achieved. Heck, we often see motivation and the joy of learning shut down long before the goal is won. Then we witness the child withdraw further and further away from schooling.

When a child withdraws from school, it's a problem. When she withdraws from learning and curiosity, it's a tragedy.

We can assess how well our children enjoy learning while we are assessing how well they are learning. The problem is that assessing joy of learning is an expensive idea. It take adults spending time with kids, talking to them about their experiences in school. Kids can't bubble in an answer to a survey question, "Do you enjoy school?" or "Are you curious?" and pretend like this is meaningful information.

In assessing learning we can make that assessment
1. Widespread - looking at every kid
2. Inexpensive and Easy to Administrate
3. Meaningful
but we can only have two of these three.

Shaming the Teacher: The LA Times faulty logic and it’s tragic consequences

2010-09-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

In August, the LA times published a list of all of the city’s teachers, raking them as “least effective,” “less effective,” “average,” “more effective,” and “most effective.”

This post will not dig too deeply into the problem of the study, which relies on a single measure, the California Standards Test, for it’s data. I’ll save that for another post. Today, all I’ll say it this:

1. At their very best, standardized test are only an imperfect snap-shot

of children’s learning;

2. The most consistent predictor of how a child will perform on one of

these test in her/his parents income level;

3. Because of apathy or anxiety, children generally know more about

a subject than a test shows; and

4. Using test scores to redefine “learning” is a dangerous trend for

public education.

In this post, we’re going to look at the faulty logic that shame motivates behavioral changes.

“If shame changed behavior, we’d all be thin,” said my Weight Watchers coach years ago. Overweight people, like myself, are bombarded with overt and covert messages telling us that we should feel ashamed for being big, for eating too much or eating unhealthy foods. The looks, I’ve gotten buying a dozen doughnuts for the staff… as if I’m going to go out to my car and eat all twelve myself, washing them down with a quart of chocolate milk.

Shame does not produce a change of behavior. Quite the opposite, it produces defensiveness, anger, depression, self-loathing, and reinforces the very behaviors at the core of the “Shame” dynamic. That shopkeeper looking at me that way made me angry. What jerk. You know what would make me feel better? A second doughnut. Ugh… I can’t believe I ate three doughnuts. I am a fat, pathetic loser…

Such a productive cycle we have here.

The process is not all that similar with teachers and our current trend to identify the so-called worst and get rid of them. Let’s imagine the world that the LA Times must think it’s living in where these tactics work for positive change…

LA Times, “Some of you teachers are not doing a very good job! Children aren’t learning! We know this because they aren’t scoring high enough on this test here! We’re going to publish your names and tell everyone how you’re not doing a good job!”

Teacher, “OMG, LA Times! I had no idea that the problem of student learning for so important! But now that you’ve called me “less effective” for all the world to see, I understand how important children are. Luckily, I’ve been holding back a lot of my time and energy loafing around the internet and watching TV, so I can start giving 110% right now! Thank you LA Times for showing me the error of my ways!”

Who lives in a world like that? Who lives in a world where shaming people and calling them names actually gets you what you want?

Back on planet Earth, we can see the typical reaction to the Shame dynamic playing itself out in California. Some teachers are angry, calling for a boycott of the LA Times. Many of us are defensive, trying to shift the blame onto students or parents or administrators, or politicians.

Some of us are possibly feeling depression and self-loathing like 39-year-old Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, who was labeled “less effective” by the LA Time. Mr. Ruelas was a well-respected veteran teacher who did not shrink from the task of teaching at a school in an impoverished and violent neighborhood in LA. According to his colleagues, Mr. Ruelas was despondent over his ranking in the days leading up to his apparent suicide.

We cannot shame our way to a better public school system. Teachers like Mr. Ruelas are heroes for their willingness to teach in poor, violent neighborhoods in our cities. The parents living in those neighbors are heroes for trying to help their children go further then they currently are. The students in those schools are heroes for walking though those violence and crime-ridden streets to get to school each day. We should honor these people like the heroes they are rather than pointing at them and saying that they are the cause of the misery that are working so hard to combat.

It’s like were blaming the fire department for causing the fire because they aren’t putting it out as fast as we would like. It’s like blaming the police for crimes because they aren’t arresting criminals fast enough. It’s like blaming ministers for the divorce rate. It’s like blaming doctors for making us sick because we are not healing fast enough. We can see how of the four above examples are crazy, yet, at the same time, we go right on blaming students, parents, and teachers because public education is not raising children out of poverty and into college and careers fast enough.

We do need to identify teachers who are making great strides to educate children in our impoverished communities. We need to look at what they are doing and see if other teachers can try some of their ideas and have similar success. We need to help struggling teachers with new ideas and time to plan and collaborate. However, making those ranking public, embarrassing and shame teachers must be avoided.

Shaming teachers won’t help.

A Longer School Year

2010-09-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the President called for a longer school year. He mentioned that American children go to school about a month less than other industrial nations each year.

Most teachers are in support of a longer school day and a longer school year. We recognize the learning loss that occurs each summer. We also wouldn't mind seeing kids getting high-quality tutoring after school, or having our kids for longer periods through-out the school day.

 But please do not assume that teachers are willing to provide those added services free of charge.   Many so-called educational reformers like to decry the number of hours teachers work. When they talk about this, they only mention the number of days and hours that a school district can mandate through their contract with the local teachers union. Using myself in Oakland as an example, that comes to 185 workdays per year and 7 1/2 hours each of those days.   

These so-called reformers never want to talk about the actual numbers of hours that teachers work. They don't want to talk about the hours I am grading student essays on a Saturday or Sunday. They don't want to talk about how I arrive at school 90 minutes early each day putting the final touches on a lesson, making photocopies, and writing on the white board. They don't want to talk about the stack of papers the average teacher lungs home each day. They never see the days I spend each summer revamping old lessons to make them better or dreaming up entirely new lessons I am excited to share with my future classes. They seem to forget how the teacher answered the 8PM e-mail and made phone calls to parents around dinnertime.

This is all work, too. The reality remains, and is shown in numerous studies, that average teacher puts in the same number of work hours in 185 work days as other professionals put in over a 250 work-day year.

All the while, teachers are paid much lower than their colleagues in professions requiring similar education backgrounds. Using myself as an example, with a graduate degree and fifteen years of experience, I receive about $68,000 / year teaching in Oakland. That is less than a starting salary in the private sector for someone with analogous educational training.  

The President’s idea of an additional month of school would result in about an additional 15% workload for me. I would do it… for a 15% raise.

When teachers push back against school district and demand more money for extra work, the typical response is a guilt trip akin to, “We need to do it for the children.” Teachers are then casts as children-hating ogres for being unwilling to work 11 hour-days instead of 10 for the same low wages. Too often that guilt trip works on teachers, precisely because we love our kids.

I tried to see if “for the children” might actually be a silver-bullet for public education. Perhaps we could make “doing it for the children” a plausible solution to the longer school day and longer school year dilemma. So I did a little experiment.

First, I talked to my landlady. I asked her a 15% reduction in my rent, “for the children.” She said, “no.” After that, I went to Trader Joe’s and asked if I could receive 15% off my purchases there, “for the children.” The manager said, “no.” After that, I went to Chevron to see if I could get 15% off my purchase of gasoline for my car, “for the children.” Again, the answer was, “no.” I got so discouraged that I stopped asking after this. It seemed that no one was willing to give 15% more for free, “for the children.”

So I'm willing to work longer hours each day and more days each year in order to help my children learn and remember more... but I'm not willing to do it for free. Is Oakland Unified School District, the state of California, or America willing to pay me to provide these services? They should. They should do it, “for the children.”

Another musing about teacher tenure...

2010-09-27T18:17:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Administrators ruled their schools. If the children were too noisy, a teacher might get fired. If a teacher was outed as gay, a teacher might get fired. If a teacher spoke up too often in opposition, a teacher might get fired. If a teacher refused to adhere to the principal's pet education-reform, a teacher might get fired.

It seems like these this could never happen today. And your right. Because teachers have due process rights (commonly referred to as tenure.)

Don't pretend for a second that bad teachers can't be fired. They can.

It's about a 2-year process. An Administrator has to build a case to show that the teacher is actually incompetent. One or two bad observations are not enough. Then, the teacher gets a chance to receive some professional development and training in order to do better.

If the teacher refuses to try to improve, or does not make progress, then the teacher can be fired.

I think the term "Tenure" has been appropriated and redefined by politicians, reform pundits, and administrators.

They convinced many in the public that teachers with "Tenure" have to rape, steal, and murder before they can be let go.

Back on planet reality, teachers have due-process rights. This means, that:

1. The teacher has a right to know why s/he is being fired,
2. The teacher has a chance to improve, and,
3. The teacher has a right to appeal the decision to a neutral party.

Braiiiiinnnnsssss!!!!!!!

Doesn't that sound more reasonable than "Jobs for life so the boogie-teachers can ruin your children's lives"?

Waiting for or Protesting Superman

2010-09-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

Don't worry Super Grover, we'll get you
into a charter school!

A lot of teachers are feeling frustrated and angry about the new movie "Waiting for Superman." It's true that this film does not give a holistic picture of public education. Instead it focuses on the stories of five children who are likely going to attend five under funded, understaffed, and unsuccessful schools, and their hopes to win a lottery that will allow them to enroll in a charter school that is having a lot more success. Frankly, I am neither shocked or angry at the narrow scope of the film. In my minds, what we have here is a film adaptation of Jonathan Kozol's excellent book, Savage Inequalities, updated to include the modern charter-school movement.

I work in a public school similar to the ones portrayed as failing in this film. Nearly half of our incoming freshmen will still be there senior year. Those remaining seniors, will most likely graduate and many of them will start college. However, most of our college goers will be enrolling in community colleges rather than four-year institutions, and many of them will not graduate.

What "Waiting for Superman" wouldn't show you about my school are the dozens and dozens of teachers, parents, students, community members, and administrators trying to make our school better. What "Waiting for Superman" doesn't show you is the patchwork of quality that makes up the charter-school movement. Some charter schools, like some public schools, are excellent. Some charter schools, like some public schools are not serving their communities nearly well enough. Most charter schools, like most public schools, are somewhere in the middle.

I wish my colleagues would stop expressing so must vitriol about this film and acknowledge it for what it is, a narrow portrait. I think we are overly caught up in the Shame/Blame dynamic. Too many of us seem to think that we cannot allow any criticism of public schools or public school teachers. Perhaps we think that if we acknowledge some of our problems and failings then we should feel ashamed of ourselves. Since we cannot accept the shame, many of us choose instead to blame others: Parents don't care about their children's education; politicians wont fund schools properly; kids are impossible these days; reformers and principals just want to blame teachers.

Don't let the pundits shame you! One of tactics of some of these pundits right now is to shame teachers into working even longer hours and donating even more time, energy and money that we have been.

I am sure that you are like me: that you average 10+ hour days; that you think of lessons at night and on the weekend and are suddenly working some more; that when your kids need something and the school wont buy it, you do.

Teachers working just a little bit more is not a solution. When Geoffrey Canada commented on Oprah that he couldn't get the teachers to "work just one more hour," he neglected the fact that this would mean now working 11+ hours a day for most teachers.

One of our BIG challenges is not to accept the Shame and not to transfer the Blame onto children, parents, even administrators, politicians and pundits.

Instead, we have to clearly name the Shame-Blame dynamic for what it is, discuss how this dynamic is neither helpful nor productive. Instead, we should focus our energies toward ways we can rebuild trust across these divides and we should put our energies toward imagining what a well-functioning public school system should look like and begin taking steps to get us from here to there.

A Lack of Hope

2010-09-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

What is the matter with low-achieving, unmotivated urban youth?

I'm not saying that urban youth are themselves low-achieving or unmotivated, quite the contrary, I see and teach highly motivated urban youth every day at Skyline High School in Oakland. Nor am I arguing that there are no low-achieving or unmotivated youth in the suburbs and the country. I certainly had plenty of unmotivated children sitting in my classroom in rural Eureka, California.

That being said, there are some students who live in conditions exasperated by urban poverty and violent neighborhoods. Many of my students living in urban poverty have lost hope that their lives can be better that they are; that their lives can be better than the lives their parents live; or that education may be a way to pave a road to a brighter future.

For some of my children, the loss of hope is not unwarranted. Last year, Eric was ready to graduate. He didn't get amazing grades, but he got pretty good grades. He loved playing football, was well liked, and had been accepted to Cal State Chico for the fall. He is on his way to being one of the not-nearly-enough success stories of our school. On his eighteenth birthday, another child, who was running with one of the cities gangs, tried to crash Eric's birthday party. Eric told him to leave, and the boy did, returning later with a gun and murdering Eric.

What is the message for our kids who were there, or who knew Eric, or knew someone who knew Eric? One message was pretty clear. Don't delay fun. Don't worry about the future. There is no way out of these violent neighborhoods. Even if you do all the so-called right things that your teachers tell you will lead you to a better life, you can still be gunned down; any day, any time.

I think this is the primary reason why Skyline is struggling so much to reduce our dropout rates.

A teacher-mentor of mine once told me, "Kids don't care what you know until they know you care." Sage advise. I think I've got the handle on caring about my kids and on letting them know that I care. We joke, we argue, we hug, we celebrate, we mourn together. I think my kids know that I care about them even more than I care about their grades.

What I am struggling with is the lack of hope. How can I give it to them? How can they achieve it for themselves? I can tell them that I see a college graduate when I look at them, but I can also see that some of them don't even see a high school graduate in the mirror.