Atlanta Superintendent Deeply Confused

Dr. Meria Castarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, thinks everyone is completely misunderstanding the situation.

APS has just announced the slashing of eighteen band and orchestra teachers from the elementary school system, and possibly the funding for those programs as well (the reportage on the latter is a little fuzzy).

That news spread pretty quickly, and Dr. Castarphen took to her personal blog to offer an explanation. Kind of.

Yes, eighteen positions were cut. That was just part of a district "right-sizing" (lordy, but I just live for the day that some boss announces "right-sizing" as an explanation for hiring more people). This right-sizing included cutting 368 positions, including a chunk from the central office. But cutting music?! No!! Well, maybe. Sort of. Yes.

In our cluster planning and our move to a new operating system, APS has given clusters and schools more freedom and flexibility to choose how they staff their schools in order to meet the specific needs of their students. This includes the decision about which arts and music instruction to offer students.

For example, if principal A observed high interest in band over orchestra in their elementary school, that principal could choose to enhance the band program and remove the orchestra program. If principal B saw a growing interest in visual arts, principal B could decide to invest more in visual arts, eliminating band and orchestra. If principal C was interested in enhancing band and orchestra programs, principal C could choose to increase school class sizes in order to offer a more robust fine arts program.

See, even if the school doesn't have a band program. It could be taught by, I don't know, pixies, or regular classroom teachers on their lunch hours, or traveling street musicians who were coaxed into the building. Because students can be taught to play instruments, particularly as beginners, by pretty much anybody.

Maybe students will get really interested in a band, which I suppose could happen despite the fact that they have no band or band teacher in the building to pique that interest-- maybe they'll read about bands in books or see some compelling band music on tv or those same instrument-teaching pixies will visit them in their sleep.

Also, please note that middle school and high school band and orchestra are not being cut. Nosirree. They will still be there, thriving despite the fact that students will arrive from the elementary school without any knowledge of playing in a music ensemble or playing an instrument. Because middle and high school programs don't depend on feeder programs in the elementary at all.

She tried to clarify her position in other interviews

"That doesn't mean you eliminate programming because you eliminated a positon. You can still do the programming with one person instead of two people," said Carstarphen. "We allow those teachers and those principals to still offer band and orchestra as part of their design if they are able to do it with what they have as a student population, available resources and the interest of the school."

See? They can have a music program. Just not with enough qualified teachers or resources. We aren't taking the puppy to the pound-- we just aren't going to feed it ever, and you can still keep it once it's a dog.

Oh, yeah. And she's in charge of converting Atlanta to an all-charter system. You can read their whole presentation and application for charter status here.

Reading her plaintive pleas for understanding, I could only think of one question--

Is this woman really that clueless?

It doesn't seem possible; in her blog post, she identifies herself as an oboe player. An oboe. The kind of advanced (and expensive) instrument that students generally move onto only in high school after they have mastered a more standard instrument in elementary and middle school.

I mean, there are only two possibilities here. Either she doesn't understand the implications of these cuts, or she understands and she's trying to lie and bluff her way past this.

There are limited clues. Castarphen was hired just a year ago, to replace the superintendent who replaced the superintendent who presided over the Atlanta cheating scandal. When Castarphen was hired, "embattled" turned up often as a descriptor of APS. Previously Castarphen led the Austin school system for five years, a system twice as big as Atlanta's. According to some sources, Atlanta pursued her; but her Austin contract had not been renewed and would be running out now. In 2012, district leaders "admonished" her to build better relationships with staff, parents and community. In fact, she was the only candidate the board brought forward after a process some called "opaque."

In Austin, Castarphen came under fire for a "closed leadership style" and "there are those who believe Carstarphen's hard-charging methods are aimed at bullying people to get her way." That stood in contrast to her defense of No Child Left Behind as a program providing necessary transparency. "And that's at the heart of what the spirit of the law is about: Transparency. Are we doing the job or not?

Before Austin, Castarphen was head of St. Paul Public Schools, where critics accused her of a combative style (the word "bullying" turns up again) and over half the administrators there in 2006 when she arrived left before her departure three years later.

Castarphen's teaching routes go back to teaching middle school Spanish. Studied at Tulane, Harvard. Affiliated with ETS, Council of Great City Schools.

I don't see it. Maybe it's just not her style to say, "We are strapped for cash, and as much as I hate to cut any program off at the knees, I've decided that instrumental music is going to take a gut shot so we can try to save the district." That might have been more honest, but I suppose it would have invited debate, and Castarphen doesn't seem to be a fan. Of course, she now finds herself embroiled in a debate about whether or not musical yetis riding on unicorns will keep Atlanta's music program alive and well. She probably should just stick to a debate about reality.  

Upon arriving in Atlanta, she told staff, "You're going to work harder than you ever have before. But we'll try to make it fun, we'll try to make it exciting and we'll try to make it rewarding."

If I Had Been in Atlanta

Much has been written about the conviction of the Atlanta teachers from the standpoint of society-- how should we react, should they have been convicted, how should they be punished, what this tells us about the system, etc. Here's a great article comparing their fates to the fates of our economy-crushing housing crisis creators. Here's what one of my favorite political writers, Jason Linkins, had to say. And here, tied more closely to testing policy, is what blogger Stephen Singer had to say. And if you'd like the background of how this happened, last year's New Yorker article is thorough.

But as I've watched this unfold and read through many reactions to the prosecution and conviction, I find myself coming back to the more personal question--

What would I have done if I had been in Atlanta?

Most teachers have a visceral reaction to cheating-- bad, wrong, don't, don't ever, ever, ever, ever do it. I'm no different. Cheating is wrong. Dishonesty is wrong. And, frankly, I've made enough mistakes in my own life to know that sick-at-gut feeling of living dishonestly, to know it personally and to live with a pretty strong commitment to never feeling it again.

But I'm not in Atlanta.

I teach in a small town high school in a rural area that is mostly free of the high-pressure troubles of poor urban schools. We're pretty unwealthy ourselves, but here in the hinterlands, there aren't a lot of charters and privateers trying to crack open the market. We're also the only high school in the district, so we don't have people breathing down our necks with score sheets in one hand and demolition plans in the other.

I also teach for bosses who are not score-obsessed or threatening to end my career if I don't make my numbers. The state may slowly be losing its mind with teacher evaluations, but my bosses still judge me on how well I teach.

So I'm not in Atlanta. I'm not working under the constant threat of punishment for crazy factors beyond my control. So if I stand up and nobly proclaim that I am 100% certain I would never do what those teachers in Atlanta were convicted of doing (and what so many other teachers across the country have not been convicted of doing), I would be talking out of some orifice other than my mouth.

I know some of the factors I would consider.

I think one of the worst results of the cheating in Atlanta (and in DC and Philly and Houston) is that cheating on tests has bolstered the illusion that reform is working.

Teachers are often terrible institutional enablers. Somebody up the line makes a bad policy choice, and rather than let our students suffer for that choice, we "fix" it on the classroom level. This solves the problem for the current students, but it also gives the administration the impression that the policy works just great.

Sometimes it's necessary to step back and allow a single small mess in the present to avoid huge systemic ongoing disasters in the future. It is one of the things I wonder-- how much longer did No Child Left Behind keep chewing up education because all of us in the classroom were doing our best to make it look as if NCLB were actually working?

But thinking about that would also remind me that we lie and cheat on the small scale all the time. We put our name on all manner of paperwork, from fictitious lesson plans to dust-collecting standards alignment documents, with no intention of pledging ourselves to pay attention. In teaching, nodding your head and signing your name to baloney is part of the normal price of admission. Raise your hand if you've never fudged a student's grade for your own class. Yeah, that's what I thought.

We accept it because we think of it as paperwork that doesn't matter, that has no bearing on the real work we do. I don't consider the Pennsylvania's Big Standardized Test anything more than a time-wasting big pile of useless baloney; linking it to threats against my professional future won't make me respect it any more, but my lack of respect for it would probably make it easier to cross that line.

Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says, given the overuse and abuse of standardized testing, "It is hardly surprising that more school professionals cross the ethical line."

But here's the thing-- all teachers were pushed across an ethical line years ago. No Child Left Behind codified a whole raft of educational malpractice. It required, among other things, that teachers treat the big Standardized Test as the gold standard of what education is about. It required that we tell our students, "Nothing is more important to your future than getting a good score on the BS Test." And as most of us recognize, that is a lie. It is especially a lie for poor students who lack both the skills to excel at test taking and who also lack much of what they need beyond test-taking ability. It's like taking poor kids to the store, handing them ten dollars, and saying, "Now, the only thing you need to plan a great menu for the week is this fifteen-dollar case of Twinkies."

The Atlanta teachers were over the ethical line from the moment NCLB was made law. They could either follow the letter of the law, stop doing the things that were turning their school around and focus on a bogus test for a system that would inevitably chew them up, or they could try to trick the system into sparing them in hopes that some students could eventually be saved. Both choices are unethical, but one choice was far more likely to serve the interests of the students-- at least in the short term.

NCLB and much education reform nonsense makes me angry precisely because it gives me a lose-lose choice. I can break the rules and commit educational malpractice, or I can do what I know professionally is correct and break some rules while doing it. Or I can, as most teachers do, try to create some sort of clever parquet out of the two and tap dance my way through the teaching day.
Teaching has, in one short generation, turned from a profession with extraordinary ethical clarity into one of shadows and greyness and compromises that we make with the system, our students, and ourselves.

If I had been in Atlanta, what would I have done?

The honest answer is that I don't know. I might have refused to cheat at all and instead tried to wave my hands and draw attention to the crash and burn that followed, but the modern ed reform approach has been crashing and burning, with virtually no successes to speak of, for over a decade-- and nobody in power seems to care.

So I might have decided to try to save my kids and my school, and I might have stepped into it by increments, until I was confronted by the horror of people trying to laud my "success" publicly.
I might have looked for other work, if I could, but I am a nester and when I put down roots in a community, I'm unlikely to pick up. I might have left the profession, but it would have been bitter to abandon my students to someone else willing to live on the wrong side of the ethically line. I might have become obnoxious and angry, that guy who makes everyone's eyes roll in staff meetings, and blogged angrily as well, until I managed to get myself reprimanded and fired for insubordination. Except in all those cases, a decade ago I would have had to face the prosepct of being a divorced dad with kids to look out for.

One of my fundamental beliefs about life is that, no matter how dark the place you find yourself, no matter how many wrong choices you have made, there is always a right choice open to you. So it is a hard thing for me to imagine that there were no good choices available for the Atlanta teachers (or all the other cheating teachers who haven't been arrested or ruined). But I wasn't there, and I have no way of knowing exactly what choices they faced.

And yet there is something baldfaced and ugly about taking out an eraser and changing the answers on a test. It seems like a bigger jump. But is it?

Making ethical choices in unethical circumstances is damned hard. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized the conviction of the Atlanta teachers as what it is-- a sign that the system is horribly out of whack. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized that a teacher who changes answers on a test is not the equivalent of a dangerous organized crime figure who needs to be locked up for the safety of society. I'm not holding my breath.

Instead, I'm just remembering to hoping that my big Atlanta moment never comes, but if it does, that I recognize it and that I find a choice that I can live with.

Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats

Katrina Is Headed for Atlanta

Over the weekend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an advertisement for article about New Orleans charterfied school district, because the Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia would like to get rid of his own public school system. He's just not fortunate enough to have a major hurricane tear up his state. But don't worry, Georgians-- you, too, can have your own disaster area.

The article, among other things, shows that charter marketing is improving. For instance, they've learned that they need to talk more about being connected to the community and less about escaping the tyranny of zip codes. This helps them conceal that charter schools are not neighborhood schools, disconnected from any particular community (if you want to read a scholarly look at this in New Orleans, here's Brian Beabout's "Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts.") Sarrio says that unnamed Louisiana educators recommend making the community part of the decisions, which seems to conflict with this NPR coverage of the district entitled "The End of Neighborhood Schools."

But the basic sales pitch is the same as always. Talking about the Arthur Ashe charter, Jaime Sarrio writes:

Advocates of the model say Ashe and schools like it show what’s possible when elected school boards, unions and poorly run school systems get out of the way and let school leaders decide how to educate students.

How exactly does one square getting rid of locally elected school boards with being connected to your community? "We are happy to work with members of the community just so long as they never get to make any decisions"? It's that damned democracy-- it so cramps a "school leader's" style.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal wants voters to create a state-run district to take over struggling schools.

This sort of thing must give hard-core conservatives a fit. Replace schools with a state-run system?! Who runs the current system? Keebler elves? But of course, Deal means to cut local control out of the loop, so that state-level bureaucrats can apply their higher levels of wisdom, because local school boards are all tied up in elections and regulations and such. Also, it's easier for charter operators to have one stop shopping.

The "freedom from rules" argument is an old one for charters, and after all these years it still makes zero sense. The government has tied public schools' hands with all these terrible rules, so we need new schools, say the legislators who tied schools' hands in the first place. Couldn't we just, I don't know, untie some hands? This is like locking a bunch of people in a room, throwing a molotov cocktail in there with them, then standing outside the door with the keys and saying, "Well, I guess we have to build another set of doors." Use the damn keys (and stop throwing molotov cocktails)!

Sarrio's article includes a short history of NOLA's Recovery School District. I've read a lot about the district; this history seems like the version you would get only by reading the press releases of the charter boosters. Here's state board member and charter cheerleader Leslie Jacobs:

“The philosophy behind the recovery school district is very simple: Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better,” Jacobs said. They wanted to make “the risk of doing nothing in the face of failure more painful than the risk of trying something that doesn’t work.”

Let's be honest-- we're talking about sub-contracting a government function to a money-making entity. And unless I missed something, this "same building, same kids" stuff is high grade baloney.

Sarrio's article includes the same old charter dog whistles:

“You have to have people who believe all kids can learn regardless of where they come from, and we believe that,” said Erin Hames, education policy advisor for Gov. Nathan Deal.

Right. Because teachers don't believe any such thing. If you want people who really believe in the educational promise of children, you don't want adults who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching-- you want businessmen and bureaucrats.

Sarrio visits a KIPP school and takes a hard-hitting guided tour and discovers that-- surprise-- KIPP school is awesome! Computers! And most importantly, autonomy-- KIPP school leaders can do whatever the hell they want! Because democracy is a drag, and accountability is for lesser operations tied to that foolish democracy model.

The article also talks to "consultant" Paul Pastorek, former LA state superintendent now cashing in as an "expert" in how to charterize a school system. He indicates that such a system isn't a good fit for just any state (only the special ones, I guess). He notes that Georgia has the advantage of a "strong accountability system," which in privatization-speak means "good system for labeling schools failures so that they can be targeted for takeover."

Unnamed Louisiana school leader types also note that Georgia would need to grow itself some more school leaders, which in charter-speak usually seems to mean "people who are prepared to operate like CEOs rather than professional educators." I recommend a system like the one being launched in Ohio, which will give candidates one year of interning resulting in an MBA and a principal's certificate.

Did Sarrio discover anything in New Orleans that would suggest that the charterization was anything less than awesome. Well, she did note that some folks claimed that charters were " unevenly expelling or threatening to expel problem students in an attempt to inflate test scores." But we can relax, because "the district has made changes to address these concerns." Oh, and that lawsuit brought by parents of students with disabilities was totally settled, so that's okay now.

She did get a quote from parent advocate Karen Harper Royal suggesting that there are better ways to improve "as opposed to this game we’re playing with school roulette, closing schools and opening schools." Which is just confusing because I thought charters were totes community schools now.

Sarrio also talked to Erika McConduit-Diggs, president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, who "said the speed of the changes and the the dismissal of almost 7,000 Orleans Parish teachers, which courts later ruled unlawful, left a scar on the community that hasn’t healed."

The overall tone, however, is to suggest that the RSD is a success. Sarrio and her sources are careful not to call it a miracle, but settle for the impression that it's a modest success that is ever-so-much-better than what it replaced, and surely it will be a great idea for Georgia. I would recommend that before the next time she writes about New Orleans, Sarrio read through the works of Mercedes Schneider, Crazy Crawfish and Geauxteacher, just for starters.

Sarrio has missed a lot. A lot. In fact, if you are only going to read one other account of what's going on in NOLA, I recommend that NPR article mentioned above. In that article you can read about just how cut off these schools are from any community. You can read about the horrific process of trying to get your child into a school (and the hope that you won't be putting your child on a bus at 6 AM for a hour-plus ride). You can read about Douglass Harris and Beth Sondel and their findings that what tiny test improvements shown by RSD are the result of a narrowing of curriculum, a growing skill in teaching to the test. You can read about the hyper-repressive test-prep atmosphere of a KIPP school. You can read about how counseling out students helps grow test scores. You can read about the system's dependence on outside money to support its higher-than-state-average per pupil spending.

And this is NPR, which has not proven to be particularly loyal to the traditional public school model. And yet it seems clear that Leslie Jacobs characterization of the NOLA plan given a close-to-lede spot in Sarrio's article-- Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better-- is incorrect on all counts. They sorted the kids, closed the buildings, and spent more money to hire charter operators who have not, as yet, shown any great measure of success.

The business interests who want to take a big bite of Georgia peach did a nice job with this coverage, but the voters, taxpayers, parents, children, and community members of Georgia deserve a better, clearer, more accurate look at the public education disaster headed their way.