PA: Tenure Attack Renewed

HB 805 -- a bill to #protectexcellentteachers -- just passed the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 6-3. #HB805 #PAbudget

— StudentsFirst in PA (@PAStudentsFirst) December 4, 2015

And while the latest round budget attempts was stirring up dust, that's about as much attention as anyone was paying this week when the Pennsylvania Senate Education committee sent this direct assault on seniority in Pennsylvania back out into the world.

I last wrote about this bill back at the end of June after the PA House passed. You can skip back and see what I said back then, but here are the highlights.

The bill takes aim at two main portions of the laws regarding teacher employment-- temporary (pre-tenure) teachers, and the business of getting rid of a teacher. As I said in June, there is a large-ish amount of strike-out and new language in this, and you are encouraged to go sift through the whole thing yourself. I've read it, but you probably ought to, too.

The Small Potatoes

Pre-tenure employment used to be two years. More recently it was upped to three years. The new bill says that temporary teachers become professional employees after completing their third year. Yes, I know what I said and read before (four years), but I'm looking at the proposed language and it says that for anybody hired after June 30, 2015, "Whose work has been certified by the district superintendent to the secretary of the school district during the last four (4) months of the third year of such service ... as being satisfactory shall thereafter be a 'professional employe' within the meaning of this article."

However, the superintendent may extend that for a fourth year of temp-ness if it somehow seems that there's something to be learned about the temp teacher in a fourth year.

The Big Enchilada

The more serious issues with the bill are in the section dealing with getting rid of teachers, specifically the Why and the Who.

The bill adds another reason to jettison a teacher. The old standards were declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. Now add to that "economic reasons."

Let that sink in. It would be okay in Pennsylvania to cut teaching positions, even if everyone knows and acknowledges that such cuts are not educationally defensible. Let's also note that, given the ongoing huge problems that come with Pennsylvania's school funding system (called the most inequitable in the country) and that fact that today marks the 158th day late for our budget (supposed a deal has just been struck, but I'll believe it when I see it), the list of school district suffering economic distress in Pennsylvania includes pretty much all of them.

Now for the who.

Pennsylvania currently operates with the traditional First In Last Out system. This bill will end that. When teachers are let go, under this bill, such decisions must first consider teacher ratings from evaluations.

The bill proposes using the most blunt-instrument form of the evaluation. IOW, rather than tossing teachers based on, say, a five point difference in evaluation scores, only the category is considered. PA only has four -- crappy, needs work, pretty okay, and super-awesome. So if teachers must go, the crappy ones go first, then the needs work group, and so on. Within the groups, we revert to FILO. Also, callbacks work the same way, in reverse.

There are some fine details to go with this. The district can't suspend anybody with a super-awesome rating for economic reasons. And you are generally well-protected if two of your last three annual ratings are super-awesome (though nobody is supposed to get super-awesome ratings regularly-- we "live" in pretty good and only "visit" super-awesome). If you dump teachers because of enrollment shrinkage, you must dump an equal percentage of administrators (unless you only have five, or you get a special note from Harrisburg, etc etc).

Oh, and the bill expressly forbids districts from dumping teachers because they make too much money, which practically speaking means that districts are expressly forbidden to say out loud that's what they're doing.

Baldfaced Baloney

Practically speaking, this is a bill that reflects the baldfaced foolishness of groups like StudentsFirst. It starts with the presumption that districts are harboring large groups of terrible crappy teachers, either because principals weren't doing their jobs during the teacher pre-tenure temp period, or because awesome teachers are being thrown into the street while crappy ones keep their jobs. And as always, it rests on the fiction that administrators lack the power to get rid of teachers who can't do their jobs, and so those teachers are still there in the classroom.

It's worth noting that the folks pushing this bill have failed to come up with compelling tales of excellent teachers thrown into the street. The bill's sponsor, when he first started pushing this, resorted to a letter filled with made-up faux statistics. I'm just going to cut and paste from my earlier piece:

Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:

Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times. 

What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.

Who will be affected? 

In fact, the last round of teacher evaluations found that 98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.

The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.

Why do we care, anyway? 

This is a foot-in-the-door bill, a bill that throws out the idea of tenure and seniority and resets the whole teacher employment model around a teacher's ability to get good test scores out of her students. Because remember-- teacher evaluations are based on one chunk test scores, one chunk school rating (which are 90% test scores), and small chunk of things over which a teacher has no control.

At the moment, this may seem like a not-big-deal; after all, it draws a target mainly on 289 public school teachers. But just imagine what would happen if legislators later say, "This isn't accurate enough. Instead of basic rating, let's set job security based on each teacher's precise rating score."

At that point we get Teacher Thunderdome, and that's not just a problem for teachers. It's a problem for schools. When teachers must compete for every small numerical advantage for job security, teachers will face a real dilemma-- share a teaching strategy that will help students, or hold onto it so that you have better odds of being able to feed your own family?

And for tough schools, underfunded schools, troubled schools, the very schools that we all want to see improved filled with the students have been most underserved and neglected-- how do you recruit a teacher to a school where it's so hard to get the numbers she needs to keep her career alive?

So if you're in Pennsylvania, it's time to email your Senator to suggest that HB 805 is a bad bill that should die a quiet death. Granted, he's probably busy not getting a budget passed and doing terrible things to our pension at the same time (but that's another story). Still, it would be huge bad news if this bill somehow slipped through during the larger drama. This does not "protect excellent teachers." It just attacks the profession, forcing teachers to treat their colleagues as enemies and their students as obstacles. This bill should never, ever become law.

Cuomo to Teachers: Get the Hell Out

I'll give Andrew Cuomo this-- when he makes threats to come after someone, they aren't just empty political promises. He said he would try to break the public schools, and he appears to be determined to make it happen.

Cuomo's assault has started with a lesson in how data can serve as a mirror to reflect the biases of whoever is gazing into it.

Mangling data

Cuomo's talking points and reformy agenda have started with a simple set of data. The proficiency rate for 3rd-8th graders is 35.8% for math and 31.4% for reading. Over 90% of New York teachers received effective ratings. There are three possible explanations for why these numbers don't fit together.

1) The teacher effectiveness ratings are wrong.
2) The student proficiency numbers are wrong.
3) There is no connection between student test results and teacher effectiveness.

#3 is by far the most likely. At the very least, there isn't a shred of documentation, study or much of anything else to support the notion that test results have anything to do with teacher effectiveness. Let's also remember that we're talking about math and reading scores for 3rd through 8th graders-- exactly what should tell us about, say, 11th grade history teachers?

#3 is also affected by #2-- if the student scores don't actually mean anything, they can hardly be connected to teacher scores. And since student cut scores weren't set by any particular supportable academic standard, it's highly unlikely that they are really telling us anything about how many students are "proficient" (a term that doesn't have any actual meaning in this context).

Cuomo has, like a student who fails to check all options on a standardized multiple-choice test, simply stopped at answer #1 because that's the one he likes. He has not even pretended to consider the other two options. It would certainly appear that he is less interested in figuring out what's actually going on and more interested in using test results to draw a target on New York's teachers.

And what a target. 

Cuomo proposes that fifty percent of a teacher's evaluations be based on test scores. (This fun starts on page 229 of his Opportunity Agenda Book.) In the case of non-tested subjects or grades, "a student growth measure that measures one year of academic growth." Whatever that is supposed to mean and wherever those are supposed to come from (since the stated goal here is clear-- "We will eliminate the local measure."

Thirty-five percent of the teacher's evaluation must come from an "independent observer" who can be either 1) a principal from within or without the district, 2) an observer from the state-approved list of "entities" that can do that sort of thing or 3) a faculty member from an education program at a state university of New York (and I am imagining college ed professors across the state slapping their heads and saying, "Why, yes, thanks, that's exactly what I want to spend half my year doing!")

The remaining fifteen percent can come from a local administrator.

And that's it. Screw the whole "multiple measures" idea, and nerts to evaluations by people who know the territory, the teacher, the students, the local lay of the land.

But wait. There's more. Cuomo proposes that all cut-off scores be set at the state level. And if the teacher fails either portion of the evaluation, she fails the whole thing. In other words, if the live human says, "I watched her work and she is a great teacher" and the test scores come in low, the live human observer is over-ruled.

Can we make a teaching career less viable?

Tenure? Screw that, too. It was for 19th century college profs so they could resist political pressure, and of course there are no politics associated with teaching in New York public schools. I wonder how long it took the governor's typist to stop giggling before he could finish this part.

Now tenure requires five straight years of effective ratings. Until you hit those five straight years, you are probationary, and as long as you're probationary, you can be fired at any time for any reason.

Cuomo could not be more clear if he required every college education department to put a giant banner over its doors saying, in huge bold letters, "Get the hell out of New York."

What sane person would try to start a teaching career under these conditions. You must have five straight years of good test scores, which means that taking a job in a high-poverty school would simply be the kiss of death. In fact, if the cut scores are going to be kept the same so that almost seventy percent of New York students are failing The Big Test-- well, that means that most of the classrooms in New York will be the kiss of death to a teaching career. You would be better off betting the state of New York that you can roll snake eyes five times in a row.

Best and brightest

And yet Cuomo's plan blithers on, as if it's not obvious that he's telling future teachers to Get the Hell Out! The teacher beatdown section of the Opportunity Agenda starts with some noise about setting up a doctor-style interning program for training teachers, and I actually support that, having come from a similar residency program myself-- except that, with the stakes of testing so incredibly high, who in their right mind would let a teacher trainee into their school? The residency idea is probably necessary, because under the new, highly punitive evaluation system, what teacher would agree to host a student teacher? The residency idea begs all sorts of questions (how will the state possibly have enough capacity to handle the number of teachers they need to train) but it doesn't really matter, because given the impossible hurdles placed in the path of becoming a tenured teacher with anything remotely resembling job security, who is going to want to invest the time and effort to start on a path that can at any time, through random factors outside of your control, be yanked out from under you?

But after five sections of flipping the middle finger to every future teacher in New York, the Agenda starts its next section with this sentence:

Once we can attract and recognize the best teachers, we need to keep them in our schools.

First of all, this new system defines "best teacher" as "teacher who has class of good standardized test takers." This idea fails twice-- once by basing teacher evaluations on the results of bad invalid tests and again by removing all other considerations of quality from teaching. Nothing matters in this system but test prep. Nothing.

The Agenda goes on to say that we don't want to lose great teachers to other "more lucrative" professions. It does not say anything about losing future great teachers to other professions where they have greater work to do than spend all their days preparing children to take a pointless standardized tests. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where they are treated like professionals. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where job security is not based on a random roll of the dice.

Sigh. Cuomo proposes to set aside $2 million for incentive payments of up to $20K to encourage great teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools. Do you know how many payments of $20K you can get out of $2 million? 100. What do you think, Andy? Will 100 teachers take care of all the hard-to-staff schools in New York?

I can answer that. No-- no they will not, because those hard to staff schools will become SUPER hard to staff once you implement a system under which teaching at high-poverty low-achievement schools is an excellent way to never get to start your teaching career.

But just in case, Cuomo also wants to streamline the firing process, and since all non-tenured teachers will be fireable at any time for any reason, I think he's got that covered. Also, no more trying to rehab incompetent teachers, because under this new system, New York will be up to their collective tuchus in eager new educators.

The kisses of death

What's next? Well, back in the first section, Cuomo allowed as how teacher traineess need less theory and more real-world classroom training and experience. However, in this next section, he wants to make sure the new teachers are Good Enough by giving them some standardized tests, which I was going to mock, but you know, since in Cuomo's New York a teacher's job is to prepare students to take a standardized test, it does make sense that taking a standardized test should be the basis of teacher training. So prospective teachers will have to pass some standardized tests, and if too many of them fail, their college program will be shut down. So congratulations, future New York teachers, and welcome to four college years of test prep. Wow. I bet that will attract even more of the best and the brightest to teaching.

I know this is running long, but I want you to get the full grandeur of Cuomo's public school-crushing plans.

We'll make it harder to get into grad school. We'll make your certificate dependent on getting continuing ed hours, but we'll put all of those programs under the direct control of the state education department.

This next one is genius. Cuomo wants to guarantee that not student will have an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Let's think this through. An ineffective teacher is one who is put in a room with the low-scoring students. Whatever teacher we send those students on to will likely also "become" ineffective. Some schools can look forward to small packs of teacher-crushing students, moving like kryptonite through the system. Depending on the VAM sauce that's being brewed, those packs could be composed of low-ability- high-poverty, or even highly gifted students. This schedule shuffling will also guarantee that teachers can't easily develop a specialty, and that administrators can't schedule based on what they know about teacher strengths and weaknesses. And those young teachers trying to get their five straight years of good test scores in? It just became even harder. What, I wonder, does Cuomo propose if a grade level or subject are in a school runs out of teachers who were rated effective this year?

Once again, the message is clear-- whatever you do, don't get a job in a high-poverty low-achievement school.

Finishing touches

Cuomo commits to the Bottom 5% model of school failure, guaranteeing that there are always failing schools. Lucky for them he has decided to scrap time-consuming turnaround plans and just implement receivership, a nifty technique for privatizing a school and handing it over to a specialist for carving up.

Carving up for whom? Well, the very next item is the abolition of caps on charter authorization, so that charters can bloom across the land like a thousand flowers. This comes attached to a meaningless provision that is hilariously called an "anti-creaming provision" because what fun are these long government documents if you can't slip some mildly obscene easter eggs in there? Cuomo also wants to establish educational tax credits, aka vouchers by another name.

Final touches? Let's expand the market for Pre-K providers by pumping more money into that, along with a rating system. The term "high-quality" let's you know that it's nothing but the best, spared no expense. It also lets you know that the state will require assessment so that presumably parents will know how well their four-year-olds are learning to take standardized tests. Oh, wait-- did I say four-year-olds? Let's up the ante and extend this to three-year-olds. Opening up new markets is always good for entrepreneurs, and those three year olds have all been slacking anyway.

So you see? When Andrew Cuomo says he wants to bust up the public ed monopoly, he's not just generating sound bites for the evening news-- he means it. The program is bold and audacious in the same way that pushing a carload of nuns and puppies into the East River is bold and audacious. In particular, it reduces teaching to a job that people would be less likely to want, and then makes it nearly impossible for them to hold onto it anyway. I try to stay away from reaching conclusions about character, but looking at this, I have to figure that Andrew Cuomo is an incredible dolt or a giant prick. I will leave it to my brothers and sister in New York to decide.

Fixing Tenure

Conversations over the holiday break have reminded me that to the regular civilians, the removal of bad teachers remains a real policy issue. There is no way to argue against that as a policy issue-- "I didn't have a single bad teacher in all my years of school," said no person ever. Arguing against a system for removing incompetence from the classroom is like arguing against the heliocentric model of the solar system; it can be done, but you'll look like a dope.

But we aren't any closer to fixing whatever is supposedly wrong with tenure than we were a few years ago. Why not? Because there are certain obstacles to the brighter bad-teacher-firing future that some dream of.


Administration

In most districts there is a perfectly good mechanism in place to fire bad teachers. But to use it, administrators have to do work and fill out forms and, you know, just all this stuff. So if you're an administrator, it's much easier to shrug and say, "Boy, I wish I could do something about Mr. McSlugteach, but you know that tenure."

A natural reluctance is understandable. In many districts, the administrator who would do the firing would be the same one who did the hiring, and who wants to say, "Yeah, I totally failed in the Hiring Good People part of my job."

Yes, there are large urban districts where the firing process is a convoluted, expensive, time-wasting mess. But that process was negotiated at contract time; school leaders signed off on it. Could a better version be negotiated? I don't know, but I'll bet no teacher facing those kind of charges thinks, "Boy, I hope this process that's going to decide my career is going to be long and drawn out."

We know that administrators can move quickly when they want to. When a teacher has done something that smells like parent lawsuit material, many administrators have no trouble leaping right over that tenure obstacle.

All of which tells us that most administrators have the tools to get rid of incompetent teachers. They just lack either the knowledge or the will. So there's our first obstacle.

Metrics vs Quality

We don't have a valid, reliable tool for measuring teacher quality. There can't be a serious grown-up left in this country who believes that VAM actually works, and that's all we've got. The Holy Grail of evaluation system is one that can't be tilted by a principal's personal judgment, except that would be a system where a good principal's good judgment would also be blocked, and that seems wrong, too. We need to allow local discretion except when we don't.

I have a whole system blocked out and I'm just waiting for a call to start my consulting career. The downside for national scalability fans is that my system would be customized to the local district, making it impossible to stack rank teachers across the country.

And even my system is challenged by the personal quality involved. I can have every graduate of my high school list their three best and worst teachers, and they can probably all do it-- but their lists won't match. Bad teaching is like pornography-- we know it when we see it. But we don't all see it the same way. Identifying how we know bad teaching is a huge challenge, as yet unsurmounted.

Metrics vs Time

But that hurdle is just about identifying who's doing a good or bad job right now. There's another question that also needs to be answered-- with support, will this teacher be better in the future?
Once we've spotted someone who's not doing well, can we make a projection about her prospects? I've known many teachers who started out kind of meh in the classroom, but got steadily better over the course of their careers (include me in that group). I've known several teachers who hit a bad patch in mid-career and slumped for a while before pulling things back together.

If I ask graduates from over two decades to list best and worst teachers, that will provide even more variety in the lists. So how do we decide whether someone is just done, or that some support and improvement will yield better results that trying to start from scratch with a new person.

Hiring replacements

Any system that facilitates removing bad teachers must also reckon with replacing them. In fact, if we were good at hiring in the first place, we'd have less need to fire.

For all the attention and money and lawyering thrown at tenure, precious little attention has been paid to where high-quality replacements are supposed to come from. Instead, we've got the feds preparing to "evaluate" ed programs with the same VAM that serious grown-ups know is not good for evaluating teachers.

But the lack of suitable replacements has to be part of the serious calculus of firing decisions. Beefing up the teacher pool must be part of the tenure discussion.

Holding onto quality

The constant gush, gush, gush of teachers abandoning the profession is also a factor. If I've just had two or three good teachers quit a department in the last year, I'm less inclined to fire the ones I have left (who at least already know the bell schedule and the detention procedures). There are many ways to address this, including many that don't cost all that much money. But if you are going to remove a feature of teaching that has always made it attractive-- job security-- you need to replace it with something.

This is why holding onto a few less-awesome teachers is better than firing some good ones-- you do not attract teachers by saying, "You might lose your job at any time for completely random reasons."
If you can't hold onto your better people, your school will be a scene of constant churn and instability, which will go a long way toward turning your okay teachers into bad teachers.

The virtues of FILO

I know, I know. Just go to the comments and leave your story of some awesome young teacher who lost her job while some grizzled hag got to stay on. First In, Last Out may be much-hated, but it has the following virtues.

1) It is completely predictable. You don't have to wonder whether or not your job is on the line. The school trades a handful of young staffers with job worries for the rest of the staff having job security.

2) It's a ladder. As a nervous young staffer, you know that if things work out, you'll earn that job security soon enough.

3) Youth. Young teachers at the beginning of their careers are best able to bounce back from losing a job. Being fired is least likely to be a career-ender for the newbs.

But in private industry--

Don't care. Schools are not combat troops, hospitals, or private corporations. I'll save the full argument for another day, but the short argument is this-- schools are not private industry, and there's no good reason to expect them to run like private industry.

Whose judgment

At the end of the day, any tenure and firing system is going to depend on somebody's judgment. When we use something like Danielson rubric or even a God-forsaken cup of VAM sauce, we are simply substituting the judgment of the person who created the system for the judgment of the people who actually work with the teacher.

True story. In a nearby district a few years ago, the teachers were called to a meeting, and as they entered the meeting, they pulled numbers out of a hat. Then as the meeting started they were told what the numbers meant-- certain numbers would have a job the next year, other numbers would not, and the last group were maybe's.

That's what an employment system that uses no personal judgment looks like, and it satisfies the needs of absolutely none of the stakeholders. What we need is a system that uses the best available judgment in the best possible way. But it will have to address all the issues above, or we're just back to numbers in a hat.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Tenure Is a Civil Rights Issue

I keep trying to write this out, and I keep getting bogged down in the many intricacies and side issues. I'm going to try once again to lay out how the people who insist that getting rid of tenure is a great leap forward for civil rights get things exactly backwards.

First, it's not even close to impossible to fire bad teachers.

Do you want to fire bad teachers? Okay-- how will you identify them, and just how bad do they have to be in order to be fire-worthy? How many people have to agree that they are bad? Remember, in the Vergara case one student's example of a terrible teacher who didn't deserve tenure was a woman who was named Teacher of the Year in her district.

The "solution" proposed by reformy types is to define teacher effectiveness (teacher goodness or the lack thereof) by looking at how well students learned. But "how well students learned" really means "how well students scored on the big state tests."

Keep in mind that the Big State Tests often test only math and reading. Do you think you can judge the quality of an eleventh grade phys ed teacher by the tenth graders' scores on a reading test?

Also keep in mind that multiple studies show that scores on those tests correlate directly to the amount of poverty in a school. Poor, urban, and/or minority students will predictably score lower on the big state tests, which means whoever teaches them will automatically pull low evaluation scores, which means volunteering to teach in high-poverty schools is volunteering to have a low (and potentially fire-worthy) effectiveness score. What do you think would be the best way to recruit teachers for those jobs?

But aren't there Value Added Measure formulas that can correct for all that? The short answer is, no, there are not. There is not a shred of evidence that those formulas do what they're supposed to, and plenty of evidence that they do not.

Which means that, despite all the noise about tenure repeal reform being a civil rights issue, the types of due process derailing being promoted will (by design or not) directly attack the quality of the teaching staffs in the schools that can least withstand these attacks. Linking teacher job security and pay to student test scores makes it harder to recruit and retain teachers for the urban schools already socked in by poverty and suffering from the instability that comes from steady staff churn.

These are also the schools in which teachers have to fight for their students, and fight hard, for everything from getting books for the classroom to speaking up about big-district policies that are unfair to the students, policies created and implemented by leaders who couldn't find their way to the school in question unless it was with a chauffeur and a GPS.

You build up any school by recruiting and retaining teachers, by building a staff that provides stability and security for the students there. You do not recruit teachers for high-poverty, low-achievement classroom jobs by saying, "Come work here. We'll chase you out the first time we get the chance, or the first time you annoy us." You recruit and retain teachers by saying, "We are investing in you for the long haul. We will work with you if you need help, and we will give you the support you need to do the job. We've got your back, and we're committed to you for the long haul. We promise that, barring actual malpractice,  you'll keep this job as long as you wish, even when we find you annoying. We hope you'll think of this school as your home for decades to come."

You build up any school by committing to a relationship with the people who work there, not by letting them know that you'll only keep them around as long as they're useful to you. If you want to protect the civil rights of the poor and minority students in this country, you protect the rights of their teachers.

Time's Tenure Story

Time's cover story by Haley Sweetland Edwards is the tale of David Welch's crusade to provide school CEO's with more power to control their workforce. I'm sure there will be much reflection on this article in the days ahead, but here's my quick read over lunch reaction.

It comes close to being a balanced reporting of the story. Public education advocates will find that it goes to easy on Welch. Reformsters will find that it is a bit too transparent and doesn't fully capture Welch's awesome heroism.

You'll want to read the whole thing for yourself, but here are some highlights that jumped out at me.

On Vergara: It was the first time, in California or anywhere else, that a court had linked the quality of a teacher, as measured by student test scores, to a pupil’s right to an education. 

Yes. It was the court that created that linkage. The plaintiffs did not, the research does not, and reality does not. But the court did.

It is a reflection of our politics that no one elected these men to take on the knotty problem of fixing our public schools, but here they are anyway, fighting for what they firmly believe is in the public interest. 

Edwards strikes this note several times, and I give Time credit for at least including the observation. But the Real Big Story here is not the tenure wars. The real big story here is that a bunch of unelected amateurs with large piles of money have decided that they should go ahead and take over previously-democratic portions of the public sector. Perhaps the editors at Time lack the balls to pick that angle, or perhaps they simply judged that the angle would not generate the kind of clicks and sales that a tenure wars angle would.

I don't really fault Edwards. The elements of the story, the reporting, are all here. But for whatever reason, we've decided not to treat the derailing of democracy by some Very Rich Guys as the main story here.

[Update: When I wrote this earlier today, I was just looking at the cybercopy of the article. I've since seen the cover, on which Time editors have put "Rotten Apples" in big bold letters. To see the cover, one would expect a massive hatchet job on teachers inside, so I guess that answers the question about how Time editors are inclined to slant Edwards's article. That just leaves the question of whether Time editors are philosophically inclined to give teachers a big punch in the face, or they just think that punching teachers in the face is mostly likely to draw a large paying crowd. Either way, I'm not impressed. If you are also unimpressed, please use this link to an AFT action to let Time know how unimpressed you are or email feedback@time.com.]

Edwards does try to draw a line between technocrat gazillionairs of today and the robber barons of yesterday, but doesn't really stick the landing on the distinction between them. The Carnegies and Rockefellers worked mostly to create new institutions such as library systems and colleges; but today's "philanthropists" are busy engineering hostile takeovers of the public institutions that were already in place.

Welch remembers asking a big-city California superintendent to tell him the one thing he needed to improve the public-school system. The answer blew Welch away. The educator didn’t ask for more money or more iPads. “He said, ‘Give me control over my workforce,'” Welch said. “It just made so much sense. I thought, Why isn’t anyone doing something about that? Why isn’t anyone fixing this?”

In this version of the story, that is the extent of Welch's research. His next move was to start getting legal advice because "if children are being harmed by these laws, then something, somewhere, is being done that’s illegal."

Edwards does not cloak any of Welch's moves in gauzy idealistic terms. Welch hires a PR firm to start Students Matter, an astro-turf group tasked with 1) ginning up support and money and 2) finding "a team of lawyers who were willing to reverse engineer a lawsuit on the basis of an untested legal theory on behalf of plaintiffs who didn’t yet exist."

The retelling of the Vergara story includes this line:

 Happily for Welch’s lawyers, their innovative argument happened to coincide with a flood of new academic research on teacher quality that could serve as evidence in court. 

One does not have to be a raving conspiracy theorist to note that the happy coincidence was the result of "research" funded by Welch's fellow technocrats and reformsters, much of it begun at about the same time that Welch started shopping for lawyers.

One major dropped ball for Edwards-- she does not discuss the major holes in the Veraga plaintiff arguments (including WAG statistics).

Edwards quotes, of all people, Mike Petrilli and Michael McShane on the problems of Vergara and government intervention. It's up to McShane to point out that measuring "grossly ineffective" is problematic. Edwards cherry-on-tops with the note that the teacher described as "ineffective and undeserving of tenure" was also a Pasadena Teacher of the year.

Edwards goes on to note that there's an irony that Vergara hinges on the ability to identify poor teachers just as we're all figuring out that we don't have that ability. She notes the current "outright mutiny" over high stakes testing and provides a quick guide to the studies showing that VAM is garbage science.

The close is a bit chilling:

 David Welch says he’s undeterred. While he’s received an informal crash course in the unforgiving politics of education reform in this country in the past year, the back-and-forth doesn’t interest him. “I look at this as my responsibility to help and improve the society I live in,” he says. “And I’m willing to fight that battle as long as I have to fight that battle.”

Welch would do well to remember that the society he lives in is a democratic one, where it's not up to a rich and powerful amateur to just commandeer a public service because he has some ideas-- ideas that or no better-informed or professionally supported than the ideas of any average non-billionaire shmoe. Nobody elected Welch to do any of this. And nobody thinks that the best way for America to work is for us to have a democratic system that can be shoved aside by any rich guy on a crusade.


Edwards article is a plus in that it pulls back the curtain (at least part way) on much of what has actually happened in the Vergara assault on tenure without gauzing it up or calling it pretty names. She misses, however, the full implications of the "control over the workforce" quote. The assault on tenure makes much more sense in the context of continued attempts to de-professionalize teaching and turn it into a low-paying, short-term, easily replaceable line of work. She missed that entirely.

Edwards could certainly have turned a more critical eye on the Vergara plaintiff's case, and she stops short of calling out some of the larger issues. On top of the rich-guy-buys-democratic-institution problem, Edwards also glosses over much as "political" issue; the tenure wars are "political" only to the extent that they represent the use of political power to smash another part of public education.

Should this be a country where anybody, regardless of his lack of professional background, can set education policy for the entire nation just because he wants to and just because he's rich? That would be a really good question to start some reporting. Edwards almost raised it-- but not quite.

In other words, Edwards has presented a reasonably fair and accurate part of the picture-- but it's only part of the picture.

TNTP Proposes New Tenure Plan

TNTP, the Reimagine Teaching people and generators of plenty of fancy-looking reformy nonsense, have some more ideas for the post-Vergara world. They have decided to stake out a middle ground on the tenure wars, claiming that we don't need to eliminate it-- just fix it. And to that end, they have eight proposals to create "a more balanced system." It's all in this very fancy "paper," which I am now going to "respond to" in this "blog post."

1. Lengthen the Tryout Period

Awarding tenure after two years is too fast, say the reformsters. Let's make it five years.

Well, let me blunt. If your administrator can't tell whether someone's a keeper or not after two years, your administrator is a dope.

But why five years? Could it be because that will guarantee a more steady turnover, allowing us to pursue our goal of fewer (or none) career teachers, thereby reducing the costs of our school business (goodbye pay raises, and goodbye pension costs). As always, I'm really waiting for fans of the longer tryout period to wrap up their argument with, "...and that's why nobody should hire TFA short-timers ever."

2. Link Tenure to Strong Performance

Today, the only performance requirement for earning tenure is not being fired. In most districts, any teacher who remains on the payroll for a given amount of time is automatically tenure.

First of, depending on what you think constitutes being fired, this is basically saying that the only way to not get tenure is by not getting tenure, which is either very zen or very dumb. At any rate, I can tell you that my own small district has let teachers go prior to awarding tenure. But look-- there's a hugely weird hole in this argument. If your problem is that your district doesn't get rid of teachers during the years they don't have tenure, what possible good will it do to have more years of teachers not having tenure. If your administrators are too dopey to let poor tenureless teachers go, how will you fix that with more tenureless teachers??

Teachers should earn tenure only after showing they can consistently help their students make significant academic progress.

How dopey is this statement? Let me count the ways

1) Do you seriously want to claim that when it comes to your seven-year-old child, the only thing you want out of her teacher is to drag better test scores out of your offspring? That's it? Are you saying that when parents, particularly parents of small children, use the phrase "great teacher" that has no meaning beyond "teacher who got my child to score higher on those tests."

2) You have no idea how to tell if a teacher consistently helped students make significant academic progress. What you mean is, "teacher got standardized test scores to generate, via some invalid disproven VAM method, numbers that look good."

3. Make Tenure Revocable

"Teachers who earn poor evaluation ratings for two years in a row should not be allowed to keep tenure." So this suggestion means either A) tenure should not actually be tenure, which is absurd, or B) teachers with tenure should still be fireable, which is already the case. Next?

4. Focus Hearings on Students' Interests

This one starts out rather bizarrely. The argument is that while "just cause" hearings say they mean the district has to prove a good cause for dismissal, in practice, "districts have been held to a much higher standard." You would think a fancy thinky tank style paper might offer some support for that assertion, but you would be wrong.

TNTP claims that arbitrators often consider the possibility of remediation as a factor, and TNTP says that's like requiring courts to convict only if they think the defendant is both guilty and likely to  repeat. It's an odd complaint, given that the justice system is just riddled with places where punishment and rehabilitation wrestle for the upper hand. From the juvenile justice system (predicated strictly on rehab) up to three strikes laws (too many repeats and the punishment increases), the justice system is absolutely loaded with considerations of both rehab potential and recidivism. But TNTP is in a hurry to draw a line between not raising student standardized test scores and becoming a convicted criminal, so there we are.

TNTP wants the hearing to focus on the potential harm to students if the teacher went back to the classroom. So, um, wait-- the arbitrator should consider how likely it is that the teacher will do a bad job again? As the argument ouroboros disappears into its own mouth, TNTP does note that superintendents should come down hard on any principal abusing the process through incompetence or bad intent.

5. Make Hearings More Efficient

Quicker is what we're looking for here. I don't think anybody at all disagrees with the notion of speedy hearings. "I'm so happy that I get to wait even longer to find out what's going to happen to my entire professional career," said no teacher ever. TNTP wants hearings to take a day, because screw complicated situations or a need for either side to present all of their information. But keep the proceedings aimed at producing speedy results? I think we can all get on board with that in principle.

6. Hire Independent Arbitrators

Arbitrators depend on school districts and teachers' unions for their employment, and so might be inclined to keep everybody happy. TNTP suggests using hearing officers such a judges to hear cases, because those guys never come with any biases, and because the court system is bored and empty with hardly any other work to do.

TNTP's complaint is not without merit, but as with much of the tenure argument, it assumes that unions have a real interest in preserving the jobs of bad teachers. That's generally not true. Teachers' unions have an interest in preserving the process, in making sure that there's no precedent by which a district can fire a teacher just because, you know, everybody knows he ought to be fired. The union's interest is in making sure that the district does its homework. That's all. It's not unheard of for unions to be quietly happy that they lost one and that Mr. McAwfulteach is out of there. But the process must be preserved, because contrary to reformster lore, there are not a gazillion bad teachers clogging schools nationwide.

7. Stop Tolerating Abuse and Sexual Misconduct

Well, other than framing this as a "When did you stop beating your wife" fallacy, there's nothing to argue with here.

8. Lower the Professional Stakes for Struggling Teachers

We should be able to fire teachers without taking away their licenses. That way, presumably, principals won't be so reluctant to fire teachers, and they will do it more often because they won't be "concerned about ending the careers of teachers who might perform well in other circumstances."

Which is an odd phrase to throw in there. I'm just trying to imagine a situation in which a tenured teacher deserves to be fired from one school, but would be a great addition at some other school. I'm having trouble.

Unless what we're hypothetically fixing here is the problem of high-poverty schools being career-enders under the reformster system. Because if you teach in a high-poverty school, you will have students whose standardized test scores are low, which means you will be judged to be ineffective, which means you will not get tenure or, perhaps, you will be fired for being ineffective. Given all that, nobody who understood the system would ever take a job in a high-poverty school ever. But if they knew that after they were inevitably fired, they could still get a job somewhere else, that would make it more appealing, maybe?

While TNTP's proposal has some worthwhile components, it still contains the basic outline of a system that throws out tenure and replaces it with a teacher employment system based on test results. That serves the interests of nobody (not teachers, students, taxpayers, citizens, or parents) except for folks who want to reimagine teaching as the sort of job that never becomes a lifetime career.

Without Tenure...

Yesterday, twitter blew up with responses to Whoopi Goldberg and the View having one more uninformed discussion of tenure (and, really, we need to talk about why education discussions keep being driven by the work of comedians).

"#WithoutTenure I can be fired for...." was the tweet template of the day, and even though I rode that bus for a bit, it occurs to me this morning that it misses the point.

It's true that in the absence of tenure, teachers can (and are) fired for all manner of ridiculous things. That's unjust and unfair. As some folks never tire of pointing out, that kind of injustice is endemic in many jobs (Why people would think that the response to injustice is to demand more injustice for more people is a whole conversation of its own). That doesn't change a thing. Firing a teacher for standing up for a student or attending the wrong church or being too far up the pay scale-- those would all be injustices. But as bad as that would be, it's not the feature of a tenureless world that would most damage education.

It's not the firing. It's the threat of firing.

Firing ends a teacher's career. The threat of firing allows other people to control every day of that teacher's career.

The threat of firing is the great "Do this or else..." It takes all the powerful people a teacher must deal with and arms each one with a nuclear device.

Give my child the lead in the school play, or else. Stop assigning homework to those kids, or else. Implement these bad practices, or else. Keep quiet about how we are going to spend the taxpayers' money, or else. Forget about the bullying you saw, or else. Don't speak up about administration conduct, or else. Teach these materials even though you know they're wrong, or else. Stop advocating for your students, or else.

Firing simply stops a teacher from doing her job.

The threat of firing coerces her into doing the job poorly.

The lack of tenure, of due process, of any requirement that a school district only fire teachers for some actual legitimate reason-- it interferes with teachers' ability to do the job they were hired to do.  It forces teachers to work under a chilling cloud where their best professional judgment, their desire to advocate for and help students, their ability to speak out and stand up are all smothered by people with the power to say, "Do as I tell you, or else."

Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.

We spent a lot of time in this country straightening out malpractice law issues, because we recognized that a doctor can't do his job well if his one concern is not getting sued into oblivion for a mistake. We created Good Samaritan laws because we don't want someone who could help in an emergency stand back and let The Worst happen because he doesn't want to get in trouble.

As a country, we understand that certain kinds of jobs can't be done well unless we give the people who do those jobs the protections they need in order to do their jobs without fear of being ruined for using their best professional judgment. Not all jobs have those protections, because not all workers face those issues.

Teachers, who answer to a hundred different bosses, need their own special set of protections. Not to help them keep the job, but to help them do it. The public needs the assurance that teachers will not be protected from the consequences of incompetence (and administrators really need to step up-- behind every teacher who shouldn't have a job are administrators who aren't doing theirs). But the public also needs the assurance that some administrator or school board member or powerful citizen will not interfere with the work the public hired the teacher to do.

Tenure is that assurance. Without tenure, every teacher is the pawn and puppet of whoever happens to be the most powerful person in the building today. Without tenure, anybody can shoulder his way into the classroom and declare, "You're going to do things my way, or else."

Tenure is not a crown and scepter for every teacher, to make them powerful and untouchable. Tenure is a bodyguard who stands at the classroom door and says, "You go ahead and teach, buddy. I'll make sure nobody interrupts just to mess with you." Taxpayers are paying us for our best professional judgment; the least they deserve is a system that allows us to give them what they're paying us for.

How Much Money Is Tenure Worth?

Economist Allison Schrager is quoted over at Yahoo putting forth the idea that tenure is worth cold hard cash.

Certainly this is not the first time the idea has been introduced. She Who Will Not Be Named tried in DC to introduce a plan to have a non-tenure big-buck track. This failed to get traction, perhaps because it's hard not to see trading tenure for big bucks as being synonymous with trading a an actual career for just one more year of teaching. And in North Carolina (motto "We're the Seventh Circle of Teacher Hell, but We Want To Dig Deeper") the money-for-tenure trade has been offered as well. Of course, the problem there is that the legislature has no idea where the money for the tenure-buyout-bonuses would come. I imagine a sort of reverse Ponzi scheme-- once they get things get going, they can pay this year's tenure-buyout-bonus by firing the teachers who have no tenure because they took the bonus last year. There's no way it can fail.

So it's possible that tenure could have monetary value to teachers, but maybe that the value is currently equal to all the money they expected to make during the rest of their career, because that's what taking one of these tenure-for-cash deals would cost them-- the rest of their careers. DC schools were never going to keep teachers on at $130K a year for thirty years.Take a pay raise, then take a hike.

Kudos to Yahoo for not simply repeating Schrager's Bloomsburgh column (though they didn't link to it, either), but pulling in Alan Singer to point out, politely, that Schrager's idea is fully stuffed with bovine fecal matter.

What we call tenure is, of course (and I say "of course" even though the world is full of people who seem not to know this), a job protection that guarantees due process, so that teachers cannot be fired for disagreeing with a school board member or administrator.

Ultimately, Singer said, from the teachers’ point of view, “freedom and money are not equivalent. Freedom should never be exchanged for money.”

I'm going to agree with Schrager here. I think tenure is a valuable benefit that is worth actual money. But here's where we part ways-- I would argue that tenure has monetary value to the school district.

Tenure helps insure the school district as an entity that a school cannot be trashed by a single disastrous individual. Whether we are talking about a bad principal or a egregious board member, tenure gives the school district a buffer, a way to protect its teachers and thereby protect its mission. Tenure is why parents in districts rarely say, "Well, Bogswallow High used to be a great place, but we had a principal who came in, fired all the best teachers and replaced them with his buddies, and now it sucks." Tenure is why parents rarely say, "Don't bother trying to get anything done about it. Everybody who works at that school is so scared of Board Member McCrazypants that they won't say or do a thing."

Yes, yes, yes, that kind of thing happens right now in some places. That's my point. How much worse would it be if there were no tenure, if teachers could not say, "You can try to make me miserable, but you can't take my job."

Tenure has value to districts in helping them avoid the costs of replacing staff, of recruiting replacements, of dealing with all the internal problems that would come with a staff that does not feel safe to use the full range of their professional skills and judgment. Tenure saves school districts money. It has monetary value to them, and because it costs them nothing to give it to teachers, it is a huge bargain.

Campbell Brown Can't Connect Dots

Monday, Campbell Brown, the new face of the attack on teacher job security, tried to "set the record straight." I suppose she did, a little, in the sense that she made it even clearer that her proposed lawsuit makes no sense. But I'm guessing that's not what she had in mind.

The tenacious New York parents who are challenging the state in court have one goal in mind: ensuring that all of our public school children have good teachers.

You know, I think I could comb the entire country, every state, every school, every teacher's lounge, every grocery store, every ballpark, every haberdashery, every Starbucks, every back alley with bad lighting-- I think I would be hard pressed to find someone who would say, "What I want is for some of the public school children in this country to have crappy teachers. That's what I would like to see."

So let's start out by setting the record straight on that goal-- it's like coming out in favor of air or food or cute puppies. It means nothing.

Lots of people want to see that every student gets a good teacher. Teachers become teachers because they dream of personally being that good teacher. The real issue is how to make that good chicken in every classroom pot dream come true.

An organization devoted to that goal might advocate for any number of things. They might advocate for more attractive teacher pay or working conditions to aid recruitment. They might advocate for a more robust system of professional support and development so that it's easy for teachers to keep getting better. They might demand better funding of ALL public schools from state and federal governments. They might even start by collecting some data beyond the anecdotal about exactly how widespread the problem of not-good teachers in classrooms actually is.

Any of these initiatives might make sense. But Campbell Brown wants us to believe that these parents sat down and said, "You know, of everything that makes it hard to insure a good teacher in every classroom, the biggest most central problem is that teachers have job security. Let's get rid of that."

Campbell says, in her straight record-setting way, "So let us dispense with the absurd: Seeking good teachers for all does not mean you are somehow going after teachers." I think she got it backwards. Going after teachers does not mean you are seeking good teachers.

Campbell tries to assert that her lawsuit is about "working to end laws that are not in the interests of children." But what she has failed to do, and what the Vergara plaintiffs failed to do, is connect these dots-- exactly how are tenure and FILO laws damaging to the interests of children? Or come at it from the other direction-- how would a school climate in which teachers were aware that they could be fired at any time for any reason help students get a better education?

This is central to these suits, and yet it has never been answered.

And in setting the record straight, she only fuzzes things up further. The lawsuit to end tenure would help students, somehow, and besides "for those who have the added due-process protections of tenure, the goal here is only to make sure that system actually makes sense, without undercutting our kids’ constitutional rights."


So, the lawsuit to end tenure is not supposed to end tenure??

And this quote from Arne Duncan "sums it up well." "Tenure itself is not the issue. Job protections for effective teachers are vital to keep teachers from being fired for random or political reasons."

So the longer Campbell works at setting things straight, the more crooked the whole things seems. Also, she adds, civil rights laws.

And tenure doesn't insure good teaching. Well, now, there you have us. Also, food and clothing and windows in a room also do not insure good teaching. If we are going to sue to get rid of everything that does not insure good teaching, we are going to be here a long time.

So what's say we go ahead and stick with things that support good teaching. Like, say, the knowledge that you can't be fired for arbitrary reasons or being too expensive.

Campbell Brown has tried to set the record straight, and yet it is more murky than ever. She is suing-- oh, no, wait-- a group of "tenacious" parents is suing, and Campbell Brown is just--what? Their new BFF? A concerned rich citizen who's now laid off and depending on her husband the charter school magnate to support her? The nice lady who writes their press for them? If this is a tenacious parent lawsuit, why are you here, Campbell? Anyway, somebody is suing in order to-- do something? Get rid of tenure, but not really hoping to fully succeed? Make it easier to fire teachers, but you know, only some teachers, because that will get students a better education... somehow?

As an exercise in record straightening, this was not very successful. I hope the next attempt by America's newest ed crusader is more helpful.

Honesty, Sass, and Public Ed

I have had this piece from Peter DeWitt open in a tab for days, trying to formulate a response. DeWitt, as he sometimes does, is pondering the problem of trying to be a calm centrist in the ongoing debate about American public education.

He believes there are people of good intent on both sides, but worries that they are being drowned out by strident, sarcastic voices that are dominating-- loudly-- the conversation. "Do we really have a problem without a solution?" he asks in the headline.

It's not the first time he's raised the issue, and it always resonates with me because I am someone who also generally likes a reasonable centrist approach to problems. I'm generally a peacemaker, not a fighter. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that I am one of the voices of sass and sarcasm in this conversation. And given my readership, I have to believe that my sass and sarcasm resonates with a fair number of people.

So how does that happen? How do a desire for solutions and taste for bridgemaking end up hand-in-hand with sass and spleenic venting?

Background Reading

Okay-- stay with me for a second. A few days back Andy Smarick wrote this piece asking, as Jennifer Berkshire put it on twitter, for people to use their inside voices when discussing charters:

I have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective.

I responded by suggesting that things looked a little more messy at the local level than up at the stratospheric philosophical level. And that charters could improve the conversation by behaving better:


If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.

Yesterday, Jersey Jazzman advanced the conversation a step by bringing up the item that addresses both Smarick and DeWitt's concerns.

Honesty.

A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools-- and, indeed, about  tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today-- is anything but honest. 

How important is honesty?

Critical conversations, in fact any kind of relationship, require one fundamental item-- both parties have to show up. Showing up requires honesty-- telling the truth as you see it. Not salesmanship, not spin, not trolling, not even "being nice" to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Anything other than honesty is corrosive to a conversation, a relationship. (And you can trust me on this-- I have the divorce papers from my first marriage to prove it.)

We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of "is" is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that's a lie. For me, that also explains what's wrong with lying-- it's an attempt to take away another person's ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It's wrong because it's about stealing another person's freedom to choose.

How do we react to being lied to? 

Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:

* I don't care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you're stupid
* We both know I'm lying, but you're powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don't matter; I'm in charge here
* This is not a real conversation

Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.

But here's the most important thing I know about lying.

Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.

So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it's a way of saying, "Look. I want you to know that I don't believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else."

In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest-- they just don't know what they're talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven't had an honest word to say about education in years.

They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I'm not so sure, but she's met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I've got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck.

How DeWitt can feel better

Anyway. If I were talking to Peter DeWitt that the sarcasm and snark are actually part of trying to get to a real conversation, not an obstacle to it. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," is snarky, but it's also an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the truth.

Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There's no way to respond to something like "We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession" that doesn't sound like snark. There's no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there's no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn't leave him feeling naked.

To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can't be afraid to go there. We can't make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can't be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.

A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf

A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf

have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf

have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf

To Tim Elmore: Here's What You're Missing

At Growing Leaders, Tim Elmore ends his column "The Cost of Bad Teachers," with a question: "Am I missing something here?"

Yes, Tim, I believe you are. I will, as you request, try to talk to you.

You lead off with a pair of questions:

Can you imagine a world where doctors, who are simply pitiful at practicing medicine, get to keep their jobs as physicians? Or where CEO's, who can't lead a company into a fair profit margin, get to remain as CEO, regardless of their unacceptable performance?

First, before the punctuation nazis get in an uproar, yes-- as punctuated, Tim, you just said that all doctors are pitiful and all CEOs are incapable of leading companies. I'm going to suggest that punctuation nazis relax so we can talk about what you clearly meant.

These questions are really beside the point, but I'm weary of the continued assertion that out in the Real World folks win and lose strictly on merit. Because without using imagination at all, I can take you to a world where hospital staffing has way more to do with politics and connections than quality. And I think we can all imagine a world where executives make choices so reckless and irresponsible and arguably illegal that they crash their company and, in some cases, bring the nation's economy to the brink of disaster, and yet these executives get to keep their jobs, get bonuses, and in some cases, receive appointment to highly lucrative government positions.

Again-- none of this really means a thing as far as dealing with less-than-stellar teachers. But I think it would be useful to stop pretending that all other sectors are humming along in perfectly-functioning meritocracies. Pretending that we have established meritocracies before just adds to the illusion that we can do it for schools. In a sense, this is like opening your argument with "Why aren't schools powered by cold fusion generators?"

You go on to refer to tenure as a "job guarantee," and you put it in quotation marks, which tells me that you know you are overstating your case here. Tenure does not guarantee a job for life. It guarantees a teacher due process, and is still a protection against being fired for reasons from benching a school board members kid in sports to campaigning for the wrong party to speaking up against a school policy that is wasting the taxpayers' money.

Teacher’s Unions have filed an appeal, but parents are not budging. They want good teachers “in” and bad teachers “out.” - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.bwO6UUjJ.dpuf

Teacher’s Unions have filed an appeal, but parents are not budging. They want good teachers “in” and bad teachers “out.” - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Teacher's unions have filed appeals but parents are not budging. They want good teachers "in" and bad teachers "out." 

This suggests that teachers' unions are somehow really devoted to keeping bad teachers in the classroom. I defy you to find me ten union teachers anywhere in public school who would agree with that sentiment.

You go on to cite some stats from the Vergara trial. The "number of bad teachers" estimate turns out to be a fabricated number (as explained by the person who fabricated it). The data about how much money a student loses over a lifetime by having a bad teacher has been debunked many, many times. Here's one example.

You then ask people to reflect on good and bad teachers they had back in school. I agree we can all do this. But as you're drifting back in memory, I want you to take it a step further. Can you remember a good teacher that every single solitary student in the classroom thought was good? Because that's our problem here. One of the teachers cited as grossly ineffective was also a multiple award-winning teacher; follow this link and you can find video of her teaching and students praising her work. But a single student in her classroom has now made this teacher a national poster child for gross ineffectiveness?

That door swings both ways. You and I both can come up with teachers that we thought were terrible. But even though Mr. McDull was uninspiring to me, I'm not so sure that I can swear definitively that he never inspired any other students at all.

My point is not that bad teachers do not exist. My point is that identifying them is far more difficult than you seem to think it is.

You say that often the union won't let schools fire bad teachers. I don't know of any school district in the country where a union has that kind of power. Now, in some large urban districts, the union can certainly make the process and long and costly, and that is absolutely and unquestionably a problem that needs to be solved. But "solving" it by destroying tenure is like solving the problem of ugly drapes by burning down your house.

You invoke supply and demand, and honestly, I have no idea what the heck that has to do with tenure. But you do wheel around to the idea that everybody should add value, and while I would argue that we should not talk about schools as if they were toaster factories, I'll play along for the purposes of this conversation, because even if we use the language of value-added, we come down to a basic problem-- we haven't got a clue how to measure it. Not a clue.

We have folks pitching the idea that we can measure it by looking a student scores on standardized tests. There are (at least) two major problems with that--

1) We don't know how to do it. We especially don't know how to do it for teachers who don't teach the testing subjects or students, but we're now looking at systems that judge teachers based on how students they never had in class do on tests of material that said teacher never taught. IOW, a school where the fifth grade phys ed teacher is evaluated based on third grade reading scores. And even if we want to evaluate the third grade teacher on those scores, are we really prepared to assert that the teacher is 100% responsible for the student scores?

2) Go back to your memory of the great teachers that inspired you. Would you say that getting you to do well on standardized tests really captures what makes you remember them as a great teacher? I didn't think so.

You finish with five statements about human nature that you believe apply here:

1) We are at our very best when we have the opportunity both to succeed and to fail.

I don't disagree. But what happens if we are operating in a system where "success" and "failure" are determined by factors that are completely beyond our control? Does that bring out our best?

2) Without the guarantee of tenure, I will strive to find a job in my strength area.

I'll be honest. I'm not sure what you're saying here. If I don't have tenure, I'll try to get a job matching my certification, because... I don't know. Having tenure in a crappy job that doesn't allow me to excel will somehow discourage me from looking for the chance to have tenure in a great job that suits me perfectly? I'd refer you back to your first point-- I will look for a chance to be my best, and that's a job where my strengths can be used to achieve success. I don't see a connection to tenure here.

3) I have incentive to keep improving when I know I must work to keep my job

And if keeping my job has nothing to do with improving? What if keeping my job means giving the school board member's kid straight A's and the lead in the school play? What if keeping my job means never ever ever questioning my administrators, even when they are making what I believe are professionally irresponsible choices? What if keeping my job means keeping a low profile and being just as bland and boring I can be?

Removing the protections of tenure does not equal "must work to keep my job." In many states and districts, it means something else entirely.

4) I become the best version of myself when I give my very best each day.

Don't disagree. But how is this connected to tenure. Do you really believe that you, personally, would stop doing decent work if you had job security? Because personally, and I try hard to show this to my students, and I think most of them find it true-- doing your best and being your best self is rewarding all by itself. I have just never met the person who I can imagine saying, "Yeah, being my best self feels okay, but not any better than being my most mediocre self, so why bother?"

5) In the end, the students lose and the faculty gains with teacher tenure.

You realize that you didn't really support either of these assertions.

As is often noted, teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions. Students benefit from teachers who can keep all their focus on teaching, and not the politicking and CYA needed to hold onto their job in an "at will" setting. Students benefit from a stable school where teachers are not regularly cycled out because they are too expensive. Students benefit from having teachers who are committed to a lifetime of teaching, just as they benefit from maintaining teaching as a profession that is actually attractive to the best and the brightest.

You do not attract the best and the brightest by saying, "We're not going to pay you much-- in fact we'll fire you if we think you're getting expensive. We won't give you much autonomy or chance to gain power and responsibility over your work conditions. And we'll fire you at any time for any reason, including reasons that have nothing to do with how good a teaching job you're doing."

But it's possible that I'm the one missing something. In your vision of a tenureless teaching world, how do you see yourself convincing people to pursue teaching as a career?

Ineffective faculty members get to keep their jobs, regardless of their poor performance in the classroom. It’s a “job guarantee” that takes away incentive for many… - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Ineffective faculty members get to keep their jobs, regardless of their poor performance in the classroom. It’s a “job guarantee” that takes away incentive for many… - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Can you imagine a world where doctors, who are simply pitiful at practicing medicine, get to keep their jobs as physicians? Or where CEO’s, who can’t lead a company into a fair profit margin, get to remain as CEO, regardless of their unacceptable performance? - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Can you imagine a world where doctors, who are simply pitiful at practicing medicine, get to keep their jobs as physicians? Or where CEO’s, who can’t lead a company into a fair profit margin, get to remain as CEO, regardless of their unacceptable performance? - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Can you imagine a world where doctors, who are simply pitiful at practicing medicine, get to keep their jobs as physicians? Or where CEO’s, who can’t lead a company into a fair profit margin, get to remain as CEO, regardless of their unacceptable performance? - See more at: http://growingleaders.com/blog/cost-bad-teachers/#sthash.b7yFgLWQ.dpuf

Duncan on Harris v. Quinn

"Collective bargaining is a fundamental right that helped build America’s middle class. I’ve seen firsthand as Education Secretary that collaborating with unions and their state and local affiliates helps improve outcomes for students. The President and I remain committed to defending collective bargaining rights."

That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing.

Here's the complete Duncan statement on Vergara.

“For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher. The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems. Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve. My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift. Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.”

When you slice baloney thinner, it's easier to see through it.


I ignored Duncan's release on Vergara initially because it seemed so transparently not about Vergara, like a spirited tap dance around a mine. Duncan hits everything except the target, finishing on a quick fade to left field. I would think that he either didn't understand the significance of Vergara, or just didn't want to, but his response to Haris v. Quinn shows he can in fact parse these things.

So Arne, perhaps you could go back and take another look at Vergara and ask what it says about collective bargaining and other employment protections as well as teachers' chance to be represented by a union. Or perhaps you'd like to expand your comment on Harris v. Quinn to explain what you think it means to support and defend collective bargaining rights.

I would hate to think that Harris v. Quinn only woke up the administration because it directly affects unions' ability to serve as a fundraising arm of the Democratic party.

Brown Presents NY Lawsuit Talking Points

In the June 24 NY Daily News, Campbell Brown presented the basic talking points for the newly-manufactured NY road show version of the Vergara trial. Here we go.

A Stirring Anecdote

Her story centers on the Williams family

One of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting help, Jada was confronted about it, and her mom received harassing calls from teachers. Subjected to unfair treatment, Jada eventually had to transfer school.

This "ordeal," says Brown, began with a student's "request for sound teaching."

It's a good story because it underlines exactly what is problematic about this sort of narrative as a model of teacher evaluation. This could in fact be the story of a student who made a reasonable request, wrote an essay about it, and was unfairly hounded by multiple teachers. While I'd like to say that I can't imagine that ever happening, it's certainly not impossible (though the harassing phone calls from plural teachers is hard to imagine).

But this could also be the story of a student who decide she knew better than a trained professional how the teacher should do his job, got called on it, and had the whole thing blow up when the school tried to deal with her insubordination and disrespect.

Either version of the story could be the truth. If we put in student hands the nuclear option of ending a teacher's career, we are certainly, as Brown says she wants to, changing the balance of power. But I'm not sure how we get to excellence in teaching by way of a student smiling and saying, "Mrs. DeGumbuddy, my lawyer and I think you really want to reconsider my grade on this essay."

The Three Basic Underminers

Brown's lawsuit (there really is no need to pretend that this is the students' lawsuit) asserts that three policies of the State of New York undermine the presence of quality teachers in the classroom.

Seniority-- "last in, first out" is bad. It's also a sign of how carefully this is all crafted, because for years I never heard the policy called anything by FILO (first in, last out). But since we need to focus on the young teachers unjustly terminated by this policy, LIFO suits us better.

Tenure-- NY makes teachers wait three years and eighteen observations for tenure. This is the most obvious difference between the New York case and Vergara (California was awarding tenure after less time). This is a hard argument to make-- if an administrator can't tell whether or not she's got a keeper after three years and eighteen observations, that administrator needs to go get a job selling real estate or groceries, because, damn!

On the plus side, I look forward to Brown's accompanying argument that all New York schools should be barred from ever again hiring Teach for America two-year contract temps. If it takes more than three years to determine if a teacher is any good, then clearly TFA is a waste of everybody's time. Do let me know when Brown brings that up.

Dismissals-- Too long, too hard. I'm not in New York, so I don't know the real numbers here. This was the weakest part of the state's case in Vergara-- while you can't rush through these proceedings, there's no excuse for dragging them out for months and years. It's not good for either party.

Brown Is Stumped

Brown's clincher is a sign that either she's playing dumb for rhetorical purposes, or she really doesn't understand schools at all.

...last year, nearly 92% of the state’s teachers outside New York City were deemed effective or highly effective. If this is the case, how can 69% of students fail to show they are proficient in math or English Language Arts testing?

The strictly factual answer of course would be the studies indicating that teachers account for 14% tops of student learning. I don't know if I buy that exact number personally, but it's out there. Certainly it can't be hard for Brown to imagine that some students are capable of sitting in a classroom with an awesome teacher and still not learn from her, either because of distraction, personal issues, or simple defiance.

But the other reason that 69% of NYS students came up short on math and ELA proficiency? Because they were supposed to. Because the NY cut scores (the line between passing and failing) were not set by using some scientific study of what a "sufficient" display of skill would be, but by determining distribution ahead of time. By saying, let's draw the pass-fail line so that 30% are above it, and the rest are below it. You can read a pretty thorough run-down of these tests by Carol Burris and John Murphy here.

And nice touch on calling the fail rate 69% instead of the 70% more commonly reported. 69% sound much more inexact and therefor more "real" than 70%, which in its very tidiness reveals its made-up origins.

I feel bad once again for the prop plaintiffs who are shown in the photo looking out at the crowd, shoulders hunched, like they are seeing a huge raging river that they have to cross. But the Vergara prop plaintiffs were well taken care of, and I'm sure these will be as well. But there is a special corner of hell reserved for adults who use children as tools to further their own agenda.

In the meantime, teachers here in the East can now look forward to a PR blitz tearing down teachers in support of a lawsuit designed to dismantle teaching as a profession. We can only hope the ultimate result will be better than the California version of this traveling circus.