Arne Duncan took a three-or-so day swing through the south, and along the way her reminded us about the many things he doesn't really get. Let's take a look at what comes up in coverage by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Not Answering Questions
AJC.com reported that in a meeting with a small, select audience, Arne was asked an excellent question by a student:
Noting how often Duncan cited the critical need for “effective teachers”
during the roundtable, the student asked, “What does that really mean?
How do we define effective teaching?”
Arne's answer included the observation that teaching is hard. Then he moved on to the notion that it involved head and heart. If you teach chemistry, you need to know stuff about it, he noted. But he also noted that the teacher who most "impacted" (gah) his life knew stuff, but cared about him. Did Arne address how the various forms of teacher evaluation required by the DOE include heart? Did he explain that Washington State lost its waiver because its teacher evaluation system did not properly evaluate the heart of the teachers? Sadly, Arne veered off from that to the old talking point of multiple measures, but did not explain which of the multiple measures might be useful for determining how much heart the tin teachers of the education forest are displaying.
Mirroring Students
No talking point tour would be complete without a mention of how the teaching force does not mirror the majority-minority of our teacher population. So Arne got that one out there.
A student asked how we can get more black and latino men to pick up the challenge, and Arne worked his way sideways into the real answer, which is that we don't need to up recruiting-- we need to improve retention.
What would keep more non-white male teachers in the field? More money isn't really the problem, says Arne. It's mentors, support and good administrators. Might be interesting to consider how much "good support" is a function of fully funding certain schools, and how much retaining good administrators might also be connected to schools that have enough resources for a leader to feel like she could do her job. But Arne's not going there. Instead, he's going to blame colleges that deliver unprepared teachers to the classroom (but he's NOT going to call out certain alternative programs that deliver "teachers" with only a few weeks of training under their belts).
Credits
“You give me the poorest kids in the toughest community, put them in a
great early childhood program, great elementary and middle schools and
great high schools with AP courses, and I am very optimistic about that
child’s chances in life,” he said.
Give him credit for staying the course. Poverty is cured by pre-K education and lots of AP classes. It's as simple as that.
Duncan rued the lack of urgency around education, starting with a
Congress that treats education as an expense rather than an investment.
I'll give him credit for this. That's actually a decent line. And I also rue the lack of urgency around education, because it leads to the notion that we might as well let a bunch of amateurs tinker around with it.
Just Plain Wrong
The AJC obligingly buries Arne's dumbest statements far down the article.
“As a nation, we are going to educate our way to a better economy.
Companies are going to go to where the skilled workers are. Hopefully,
it is here in the United States.” If not, he said, America will lose
skilled jobs to India, China or Korea.
Really? So, the loss of jobs to India and China is not about their workers great skill in willingly accepting teeny-tiny wages for work in unregulated industrial sites? Again, kudos for the consistency involved in insisting that having more trained and educated people in this country will magically cause jobs to appear. Because everyone who knows an American in their twenties has heard the heartwarming story of how college graduates over the past several years have walked out into a world of employers saying, "What!? You have a college degree?!! Wait just a second while we create a job just for you!!"
Then someone asked what a young teacher (why "young"? I have no idea) should do when confronted with students operating below grade level. Can you tell what's special about Arne's answer?
“A lot of kids below grade level haven’t been challenged in the past.
Having high standards for kids who are one to two years behind is
exactly what they need. They need more time, they need after-school
programs, they need work on Saturday and Sunday and they need summers.
But if you have a class of 25 kids and 17 of them two or three years
behind and that is what you are getting every single year, you have to
look downriver.”
No, it's not that he proposes a bunch of bogus explanations for why the child is behind. Because, yes, students who have trouble learning simply need to be pushed harder. Also, students who are short need to be challenged to grow taller-- maybe put their meals on the top shelf of a bookshelf. And when faced with something that's hard for them, who doesn't dream of devoting all their spare time to doing it some more?
But no-- it's none of that. What's special about the answer is that it doesn't actually answer the question at all. When you have students are behind, go look at their previous teachers. Maybe give 'em the stinkeye. Because that will totally fix the students' current academic problems.
It may be that Arne, as NEA-president-elect Lily Garcia suggests, sincere and well-meaning, but he's so intensely and consistently wrong. Congratulations, Atlanta.
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Adding Insult to Injury
It's a fair question. There have been plenty of reform movement imposed on education-- why is the current wave of reforminess evoking such a severe reaction among teachers.
It's not just the injuries that NCLB, RttT and Waiverism (RttT Lite) have inflicted on education. It's the insults that have gone with them.
First, there's the professional insult.
Imagine a family member is having car trouble. You're a trained, experienced mechanic, but instead of asking you for help, your family member calls your sibling, the butterfingered one who has never done anything with a car but drive it. That's more than just a snub-- that's an insult to your professional skills.
That sort of insult has been the story of reforminess every step of the way. Really Important People decided that it was time to bring some standardization to education in this country, and so they made certain NOT to call on the large body of professional educators that work their whole lives in the field. And when teacher dared to speak up about brilliant reformy bits like the Common Core, they were dismissed, as if their professional acumen was a detriment to a discussion of American public education.
That's a huge professional insult. It's the kind of thing a wise person would never, ever do to someone whose cooperation they needed. Think about it. If you need your boss's support to accomplish a project at work, the last thing you ever say to your boss is, "No, I don't want any input from you. There's nothing you know that could possibly be any help." Lord, no. Even if you plan to ignore every piece of advice that boss gives, you still make your boss feel included in the process so that you can get the necessary cooperation.
So the professional insult of reform is not just a slam on teachers' ability and experience, but a sideways statement that teachers are not important to education, that their cooperation will not be needed to make all these nifty reformy gimcracks run properly.
So, a double professional insult.
Then, the personal insults.
But reformsters went beyond the professional insults. With the various "accountability" systems, they have repeatedly made one point abundantly clear-- they consider teachers to be terrible human beings.
Yes, it may look like teachers have devoted themselves to a relatively low-paying often thankless job because of some sort of devotion to the ideals of American public education, but reformsters know the truth-- teachers are lazy slackers who don't particularly like children and only took a teaching job because they felt certain they'd never have to actually do it.
Tenure, we are told, must be destroyed because teachers will only do a good job if they know that they can be fired at any time. If we have job security, the reasoning goes, we will kick back and do nothing, because apparently that is our aspiration as teachers.
High stakes testing must be used, we were told, because schools have been lying to parents about how well students are doing, because schools are all about being big lying liars.
The accountability systems are all built around one simple premise-- that teachers will not do a decent job unless threatened and co-erced and outed to the public through regular revealing of our scores. Without the threat of job loss and the prospect of public humiliation, teachers would crawl under their desks and let chaos reign. One can only conclude from these systems that teachers are the most indolent, incompetent, unmotivated, uncommitted people who ever walked the earth.
So there you have the source of the extra anger over and above the anger about the dismantling of American public education. But please keep in mind, teachers, that as we are being routinely insulted both professionally and personally, reformsters would like us to respond in dulcet, measured tones of civility. And please don't be insulting. That would be rude.
It's not just the injuries that NCLB, RttT and Waiverism (RttT Lite) have inflicted on education. It's the insults that have gone with them.
First, there's the professional insult.
Imagine a family member is having car trouble. You're a trained, experienced mechanic, but instead of asking you for help, your family member calls your sibling, the butterfingered one who has never done anything with a car but drive it. That's more than just a snub-- that's an insult to your professional skills.
That sort of insult has been the story of reforminess every step of the way. Really Important People decided that it was time to bring some standardization to education in this country, and so they made certain NOT to call on the large body of professional educators that work their whole lives in the field. And when teacher dared to speak up about brilliant reformy bits like the Common Core, they were dismissed, as if their professional acumen was a detriment to a discussion of American public education.
That's a huge professional insult. It's the kind of thing a wise person would never, ever do to someone whose cooperation they needed. Think about it. If you need your boss's support to accomplish a project at work, the last thing you ever say to your boss is, "No, I don't want any input from you. There's nothing you know that could possibly be any help." Lord, no. Even if you plan to ignore every piece of advice that boss gives, you still make your boss feel included in the process so that you can get the necessary cooperation.
So the professional insult of reform is not just a slam on teachers' ability and experience, but a sideways statement that teachers are not important to education, that their cooperation will not be needed to make all these nifty reformy gimcracks run properly.
So, a double professional insult.
Then, the personal insults.
But reformsters went beyond the professional insults. With the various "accountability" systems, they have repeatedly made one point abundantly clear-- they consider teachers to be terrible human beings.
Yes, it may look like teachers have devoted themselves to a relatively low-paying often thankless job because of some sort of devotion to the ideals of American public education, but reformsters know the truth-- teachers are lazy slackers who don't particularly like children and only took a teaching job because they felt certain they'd never have to actually do it.
Tenure, we are told, must be destroyed because teachers will only do a good job if they know that they can be fired at any time. If we have job security, the reasoning goes, we will kick back and do nothing, because apparently that is our aspiration as teachers.
High stakes testing must be used, we were told, because schools have been lying to parents about how well students are doing, because schools are all about being big lying liars.
The accountability systems are all built around one simple premise-- that teachers will not do a decent job unless threatened and co-erced and outed to the public through regular revealing of our scores. Without the threat of job loss and the prospect of public humiliation, teachers would crawl under their desks and let chaos reign. One can only conclude from these systems that teachers are the most indolent, incompetent, unmotivated, uncommitted people who ever walked the earth.
So there you have the source of the extra anger over and above the anger about the dismantling of American public education. But please keep in mind, teachers, that as we are being routinely insulted both professionally and personally, reformsters would like us to respond in dulcet, measured tones of civility. And please don't be insulting. That would be rude.
Monday, September 8, 2014
John Oliver, Student Debt, and the Edubiz Marketplace
I really have nothing to add to this, but boy do you need to see it.
.
Okay, I have one thing to add to it. He actually missed the part where the fed bailed out Corinthian.
This is what twisted market forces look like when they hit education. When the government sets up a system with the main function of using students to funnel loan dollars to education based businesses, this is what you get. You are using students as a conduit where they allow the feds and banks to channel big money to schools, generating a profit by charging the conduits interest! The providing of an education is completely secondary to the providing of a big payday for the corporations involved.
Is it going to look any different in the K-12 world? Of course not-- choice systems are a way to funnel tax dollars to edubiz corporations. The only difference is that we're not making the people who use vouchers pay for the privilege. Yet.
But the big fat student loan packages that are being shoved through various students in need are simply another form of voucher. If I were a voucher fan, drooling over the prospect of the day when I could shop around an all-charter, all-private world of schools, I would take a good long hard look at what's going on in the world of college finance today. And I would have a good hard think about what these kinds of market forces, twisted by crony capitalism and government money-funneling, would do in that world.
As we like to say in cyberia, if you aren't paying, then you're the product. And that means your interests are not paramount. But here we see revealed the great humungus fallacy in the idea of a free market school system. Fans of that systems imagine "I will be the customer, so I will be in charge." Brzzzzt! Wrong. The customers are the schools, profiting through you. You will have no more market power than a wallet.
The College Bias
It's not new and it's not hard to explain. After all, virtually all teachers are college educated. We're pre-disposed to a collegiate bias.
Add to that the correlation between more education and more money, and add to that the manner in which DC (by way of CCSS) has institutionalized college as The Goal, and it's no surprise that in education, we have a decidedly pro-college bias.
In many high schools, it's built into the curriculum. College prep courses are for the smart kids. Non-college prep courses are for the not-so-smart ones. Non-college prep courses are not supposed to be anybody's deliberate choice, but a sort of academic safety net one falls into if one is not capable enough to hack it in the college prep classes. Sometimes we are extremely explicit about this. In her article for NEA (Ten Soul Saving Tips for New Teachers), Susan Anglada Bartley offers this tip:
8. Start with the assumption that all students wish to pursue a college or post-high school education. If you walk into your room assuming that some kids can make it to college, while others can never walk that path, they will know. Resentments will build. They will feel discriminated against and they won’t listen to you. You will lose their trust. But if you chose to empower them all by sharing resources and encouraging them all toward college, they will appreciate the opportunity. Shine the light. If you are in a high poverty environment, remember this second mantra: As a teacher, I am a guide toward a brighter future.
Well, no. Bartley, like way too many people, has conflated "won't go to college" with "be a big dumb loser at life."
I teach an honors class at my school, but I also teach our non-college prep class. I do not start the year by telling them that they can totally go to college (and thereby imply that they should want to); what I tell them is that they are in the class designed for people headed toward life "out there" and other students in that other class are headed for college. And both are equally valid and valuable.
I know, I know. All those charts showing that the more education you get, the more money you have (of course, articles touting that data rarely ask if it might be the other way around). And my President exhorts students to dream big and shoot for college. And I sent my own kids to college, and felt strongly enough about it that I'll be paying for it for years to come.
But at the same time, I am troubled by our attitude about blue collar work, our tendency to treat good solid labor as if it's some sort of bronze medal, proof that you weren't good enough to come in first place.
As Mike Rowe said repeatedly, these are the people who make civilized life possible for the rest of us. We devalue them with our low regard and with our lack of honor and attention. And we especially devalue them by telling our young people, "Oh, gracious, no. You don't want to become one of those."
We try to justify it as steering students away from types of work that are drying up and disappearing, and yet while we are still cranking out a gazillion college professor wannabe's for the two remaining college teaching jobs (part time) left in the country, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a ten million person shortfall in trained laborers by 2020. If you prefer anecdotal support, I can tell you that my brother, who manages a medium-sized industrial operation, is always looking for welders, because there aren't enough. I'd rather we didn't, but if you must measure success in dollars, I can tell you that good welders make good money.
And job (and money) prospects aside, we are perfectly willing to tell students to pursue their dreams no matter what. We tell them to go for it-- unless their dream is working at a modest labor job and hunting and fishing and sitting on the front porch.
It's not just that we have to stop pushing the notion that getting some sort of post-secondary degree is the only way to make a living. We have got to stop pushing the notion that people who get a college education are somehow better people, people more likely to win at life. My non-college classes over the years have included their share of students who are smart, hard-working, and decent men and women of considerable integrity. I have watched them grow up and take their places as productive citizens, loving parents, and fine members of this community. I would never, ever, tell them that they failed to "dream big" by going to college, and consequently their lives are meager and small.
And yes-- there are children who need to escape their circumstances, grow bigger than the world that grew them. But college is not the only worthy escape hatch.
In education, we need to walk a fine line between equipping students to follow their dreams and helping them aspire to greater dreams than they may come up with on their own. We need to do our best to give our students the tools to pursue the dreams they choose for themselves, whatever those might be. It seems so obvious, and yet the umpty-bazzillion dollars in college debt now being carried by twenty-somethings (and their parents) suggests that it is not-- not all roads to a happy and productive future lead through a college campus.
Add to that the correlation between more education and more money, and add to that the manner in which DC (by way of CCSS) has institutionalized college as The Goal, and it's no surprise that in education, we have a decidedly pro-college bias.
In many high schools, it's built into the curriculum. College prep courses are for the smart kids. Non-college prep courses are for the not-so-smart ones. Non-college prep courses are not supposed to be anybody's deliberate choice, but a sort of academic safety net one falls into if one is not capable enough to hack it in the college prep classes. Sometimes we are extremely explicit about this. In her article for NEA (Ten Soul Saving Tips for New Teachers), Susan Anglada Bartley offers this tip:
8. Start with the assumption that all students wish to pursue a college or post-high school education. If you walk into your room assuming that some kids can make it to college, while others can never walk that path, they will know. Resentments will build. They will feel discriminated against and they won’t listen to you. You will lose their trust. But if you chose to empower them all by sharing resources and encouraging them all toward college, they will appreciate the opportunity. Shine the light. If you are in a high poverty environment, remember this second mantra: As a teacher, I am a guide toward a brighter future.
Well, no. Bartley, like way too many people, has conflated "won't go to college" with "be a big dumb loser at life."
I teach an honors class at my school, but I also teach our non-college prep class. I do not start the year by telling them that they can totally go to college (and thereby imply that they should want to); what I tell them is that they are in the class designed for people headed toward life "out there" and other students in that other class are headed for college. And both are equally valid and valuable.
I know, I know. All those charts showing that the more education you get, the more money you have (of course, articles touting that data rarely ask if it might be the other way around). And my President exhorts students to dream big and shoot for college. And I sent my own kids to college, and felt strongly enough about it that I'll be paying for it for years to come.
But at the same time, I am troubled by our attitude about blue collar work, our tendency to treat good solid labor as if it's some sort of bronze medal, proof that you weren't good enough to come in first place.
As Mike Rowe said repeatedly, these are the people who make civilized life possible for the rest of us. We devalue them with our low regard and with our lack of honor and attention. And we especially devalue them by telling our young people, "Oh, gracious, no. You don't want to become one of those."
We try to justify it as steering students away from types of work that are drying up and disappearing, and yet while we are still cranking out a gazillion college professor wannabe's for the two remaining college teaching jobs (part time) left in the country, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a ten million person shortfall in trained laborers by 2020. If you prefer anecdotal support, I can tell you that my brother, who manages a medium-sized industrial operation, is always looking for welders, because there aren't enough. I'd rather we didn't, but if you must measure success in dollars, I can tell you that good welders make good money.
And job (and money) prospects aside, we are perfectly willing to tell students to pursue their dreams no matter what. We tell them to go for it-- unless their dream is working at a modest labor job and hunting and fishing and sitting on the front porch.
It's not just that we have to stop pushing the notion that getting some sort of post-secondary degree is the only way to make a living. We have got to stop pushing the notion that people who get a college education are somehow better people, people more likely to win at life. My non-college classes over the years have included their share of students who are smart, hard-working, and decent men and women of considerable integrity. I have watched them grow up and take their places as productive citizens, loving parents, and fine members of this community. I would never, ever, tell them that they failed to "dream big" by going to college, and consequently their lives are meager and small.
And yes-- there are children who need to escape their circumstances, grow bigger than the world that grew them. But college is not the only worthy escape hatch.
In education, we need to walk a fine line between equipping students to follow their dreams and helping them aspire to greater dreams than they may come up with on their own. We need to do our best to give our students the tools to pursue the dreams they choose for themselves, whatever those might be. It seems so obvious, and yet the umpty-bazzillion dollars in college debt now being carried by twenty-somethings (and their parents) suggests that it is not-- not all roads to a happy and productive future lead through a college campus.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
TFA 4.0 & Minority Teachers
Teach for America is nothing if not flexible.
In the oft-told tale, TFA was a targeted response to a specific problem-- inner-city schools that could not find enough qualified staff to fill their teacher positions. TFA would create an American teacher version of the Peace Corps, making it cool to put in a couple of years in a classroom before heading on to your real job.
In fact, TFA 2.0 came fairly quickly on the heels of Original Flavor-- logging some time in a classroom as a TFAer was a good stepping stone into the education management industry, a nice supplement to your business degree and a nice resume builder for people headed for government work or the ever-growing field of edubusinesses (charters, etc).
But that Fill in the Classroom Blanks mission was over. In Vox last week, Dana Goldstein was even giving Wendy Kopp credit for helping solve the teachers shortage crisis. You remember the teacher shortage crisis that happened...um... some time?
At any rate, the crisis was averted. But TFA did not announce "Mission Accomplished" and head off. No, instead they morphed into TFA 3.0, which on reflection was probably their least nimble move. The organization was already losing its pretty shine as people realized that, in places like Chicago and New Orleans, TFA wasn't merely filling teaching positions, but shoving the original actually-trained-in-teacher-school occupants of those positions aside.
The message of TFA 3.0 was that they were here to save education. The crisis was no longer a shortage of teachers, but a shortage of teachers who didn't suck. In ways that began to leak regularly as disenchanted recruits dropped out of TFA, the organization was pushing the message that public school teachers had just failed miserably to do their jobs and what was needed was a cadre of the Best and the Brightest to get in there, to rescue the children that nobody but TFA teachers could rescue.
TFA 3.0 was not a winning marketing strategy. The organization looked like a bunch of drive-by do-gooders, at best charity tourists heading uptown for a resume and self-esteem boost, at worst condescending White Man's Burden colonizers. TFA 3.0 was what the Onion famously lampooned in a piece that continues to be passed around on twitter.
TFA read the writing on the wall and started morphing into TFA 4.0.
They would try to be less arrogant. They would entertain the possibility that five weeks of summer camp were not sufficient for prepping inner city teachers. And they would identify a new problem to address-- minority teachers.
Somebody did their homework on this one. This is the year that white students make up less than half the student population nation wide, and yet, the makeup of teaching staffs have headed in the other direction. Some of the stats are mind-boggling-- California has a 73% non-white student population, but teachers are only 29% non-white. And no state comes close to coming close.
This counts as a real issue. Students ought to see some people who look like them in their school buildings (and the issue extends to gender-- the US teaching force is now overwhelmingly female).
And so TFA 4.0 is now a group devoted to the mission of getting non-white teachers into the classroom. They have promoted the new version of themselves well. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center Teaching Tolerance project has hired on a TFA grad to praise the new TFA. You can read the article here, but read the comments as well to see just how spirited the defense of TFA 4.0 gets.
Teacher diversity is not a bad cause to fight for. But it underlines the true nature of TFA. This kind of shifting about is not what a service organization does. If cancer is cured today, the American Cancer Society does not announce tomorrow that they will now lead the fight against obesity. No, this kind of shift is what a business does. If the product stream from our old merchandise starts to dry up, we find a new thing to sell so we can stay in business. If TFA wants to be a business, that's fine. Just don't pretend to be anything else.
The other problem with TFA and its spirited recruitment of non-white people to teach is that it addresses the wrong part of the problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the profession at a higher rate than white teachers-- but they are also leaving at a far higher rate. Nobody really knows why, though guesses include the idea that non-white teachers choose poverty-affected schools and the general chaos, lack of resources, and absence of autonomy to deal with their work all combine to chase them away.
But the big takeaway? Recruitment is not the problem. Retention is.
Unfortunately, retention issues have never been part of TFA's business model, which is centered on the Just A Few Years model of a teaching career. Given their model, TFA would be the absolute last people we would want working on the problem of retaining minority teachers. Emily Chiariello, the Teaching Tolerance TFA hire says this
More recently, TFA has focused on diversity and made deliberate changes to its recruiting techniques. First on their “who we look for” list as characteristic of successful teachers and desirable in applicants is “[a] deep belief in the potential of all kids and a commitment to do whatever it takes to expand opportunities for students, often informed by experience in low-income communities and an understanding of the systemic challenges of poverty and racism.”
But changing recruiting isn't the issue, other than it might help to start tweaking the system so that it's checking for people who will be lifetime teachers instead of two-year temps. And that's teachers-- not educational paper pushers of some sort.
If TFA wants to really make a go of helping to solve this problem, they need to look at preparing and supporting those teachers so that they can build a foundation of success that will carry them into a teaching career. But that would make the distance from TFA 1.0 to TFA 4.0 an awfully huge gap.
The lack of non-white, male teachers in the teaching force is a real issue, and it demands attention. But TFA 4.0 is not the answer.
In the oft-told tale, TFA was a targeted response to a specific problem-- inner-city schools that could not find enough qualified staff to fill their teacher positions. TFA would create an American teacher version of the Peace Corps, making it cool to put in a couple of years in a classroom before heading on to your real job.
In fact, TFA 2.0 came fairly quickly on the heels of Original Flavor-- logging some time in a classroom as a TFAer was a good stepping stone into the education management industry, a nice supplement to your business degree and a nice resume builder for people headed for government work or the ever-growing field of edubusinesses (charters, etc).
But that Fill in the Classroom Blanks mission was over. In Vox last week, Dana Goldstein was even giving Wendy Kopp credit for helping solve the teachers shortage crisis. You remember the teacher shortage crisis that happened...um... some time?
At any rate, the crisis was averted. But TFA did not announce "Mission Accomplished" and head off. No, instead they morphed into TFA 3.0, which on reflection was probably their least nimble move. The organization was already losing its pretty shine as people realized that, in places like Chicago and New Orleans, TFA wasn't merely filling teaching positions, but shoving the original actually-trained-in-teacher-school occupants of those positions aside.
The message of TFA 3.0 was that they were here to save education. The crisis was no longer a shortage of teachers, but a shortage of teachers who didn't suck. In ways that began to leak regularly as disenchanted recruits dropped out of TFA, the organization was pushing the message that public school teachers had just failed miserably to do their jobs and what was needed was a cadre of the Best and the Brightest to get in there, to rescue the children that nobody but TFA teachers could rescue.
TFA 3.0 was not a winning marketing strategy. The organization looked like a bunch of drive-by do-gooders, at best charity tourists heading uptown for a resume and self-esteem boost, at worst condescending White Man's Burden colonizers. TFA 3.0 was what the Onion famously lampooned in a piece that continues to be passed around on twitter.
TFA read the writing on the wall and started morphing into TFA 4.0.
They would try to be less arrogant. They would entertain the possibility that five weeks of summer camp were not sufficient for prepping inner city teachers. And they would identify a new problem to address-- minority teachers.
Somebody did their homework on this one. This is the year that white students make up less than half the student population nation wide, and yet, the makeup of teaching staffs have headed in the other direction. Some of the stats are mind-boggling-- California has a 73% non-white student population, but teachers are only 29% non-white. And no state comes close to coming close.
And so TFA 4.0 is now a group devoted to the mission of getting non-white teachers into the classroom. They have promoted the new version of themselves well. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center Teaching Tolerance project has hired on a TFA grad to praise the new TFA. You can read the article here, but read the comments as well to see just how spirited the defense of TFA 4.0 gets.
Teacher diversity is not a bad cause to fight for. But it underlines the true nature of TFA. This kind of shifting about is not what a service organization does. If cancer is cured today, the American Cancer Society does not announce tomorrow that they will now lead the fight against obesity. No, this kind of shift is what a business does. If the product stream from our old merchandise starts to dry up, we find a new thing to sell so we can stay in business. If TFA wants to be a business, that's fine. Just don't pretend to be anything else.
The other problem with TFA and its spirited recruitment of non-white people to teach is that it addresses the wrong part of the problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the profession at a higher rate than white teachers-- but they are also leaving at a far higher rate. Nobody really knows why, though guesses include the idea that non-white teachers choose poverty-affected schools and the general chaos, lack of resources, and absence of autonomy to deal with their work all combine to chase them away.
But the big takeaway? Recruitment is not the problem. Retention is.
Unfortunately, retention issues have never been part of TFA's business model, which is centered on the Just A Few Years model of a teaching career. Given their model, TFA would be the absolute last people we would want working on the problem of retaining minority teachers. Emily Chiariello, the Teaching Tolerance TFA hire says this
More recently, TFA has focused on diversity and made deliberate changes to its recruiting techniques. First on their “who we look for” list as characteristic of successful teachers and desirable in applicants is “[a] deep belief in the potential of all kids and a commitment to do whatever it takes to expand opportunities for students, often informed by experience in low-income communities and an understanding of the systemic challenges of poverty and racism.”
But changing recruiting isn't the issue, other than it might help to start tweaking the system so that it's checking for people who will be lifetime teachers instead of two-year temps. And that's teachers-- not educational paper pushers of some sort.
If TFA wants to really make a go of helping to solve this problem, they need to look at preparing and supporting those teachers so that they can build a foundation of success that will carry them into a teaching career. But that would make the distance from TFA 1.0 to TFA 4.0 an awfully huge gap.
The lack of non-white, male teachers in the teaching force is a real issue, and it demands attention. But TFA 4.0 is not the answer.
No, Education Post Is Not About Conversation
Twelve million dollars buys you a big splash. Many of us have launched blogs; very few of us have had heavy press coverage of the launch.
When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.
It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said
There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country. You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.
Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer.
One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.
Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate
Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story that gets written. [emphasis mine]
Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.
Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit
Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.
But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"
Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.
Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.
EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.
This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.
There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.
Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.
Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.
When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.
It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said
There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country. You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.
Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer.
One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.
Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate
Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story that gets written. [emphasis mine]
Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.
Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit
Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.
In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this
Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.
So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.
But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"
Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.
Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.
EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.
This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.
There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.
Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.
Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
The Other Conservative Reform Argument
If you've been scratching your head and wondering why several prominent conservative ed writers and thinky tankists have been turning on the Common Core lately, we have an reminder of where a new argument could be headed.
Over at SFGate, we find Vicki E. Alger, a thinky tankist from the Independent Institute (libertarian) in Oakland, presenting this article-- "American Education Needs Competition, Not Common Core."
The title pretty well says it all. The article is loaded with baloney. Did you know that the CCSS standards writers compromised on real toughness in the standards in order to get buy in from teachers' unions? Of course you didn't, for much the same reason that you weren't aware that the flames on the sun are maintained by dancing fairies.
There's more in a general Glen Becky way-- federal overreach, data gathering, feds many broken education promises. But here's the pin on which the argument pivots.
Ultimately, Common Core rests on the faulty premise that a single, centralized entity knows what's best for all 55 million students nationwide. Raising the education bar starts with putting the real experts in charge: students' parents.
For much of the new wave of reformy goodness, choice, privatization and the Core have traveled hand in hand. The premise was that CCSS would be a yardstick by which all schools could be measured, and by using it (by way of super-awesome tests) we would find out that public schools were sucky and needed to be escaped by sending students (and their money) to charter/choice/private schools.
In this newer argument, the Core is no longer a yardstick of excellence, but a straightjacket of government naughtiness. The Core used to be a tool for helping students escape terrible government schools; now it's a symbol of why government schools are terrible. This is not a new argument; it's just one that we haven't always clearly associated with the conservative fans of reforminess.
Bottom line: Reformsters who are fans of privatization and free-market voucherish solutions for the dismantling and monetization of public education-- these folks do not really need the Common Core to push their agenda, and can easily move from fighting for it to fighting against it without having to drop any other piece of their program. Alger has been beating this drum for a while; who knows when her band might suddenly get bigger.
Over at SFGate, we find Vicki E. Alger, a thinky tankist from the Independent Institute (libertarian) in Oakland, presenting this article-- "American Education Needs Competition, Not Common Core."
The title pretty well says it all. The article is loaded with baloney. Did you know that the CCSS standards writers compromised on real toughness in the standards in order to get buy in from teachers' unions? Of course you didn't, for much the same reason that you weren't aware that the flames on the sun are maintained by dancing fairies.
There's more in a general Glen Becky way-- federal overreach, data gathering, feds many broken education promises. But here's the pin on which the argument pivots.
Ultimately, Common Core rests on the faulty premise that a single, centralized entity knows what's best for all 55 million students nationwide. Raising the education bar starts with putting the real experts in charge: students' parents.
For much of the new wave of reformy goodness, choice, privatization and the Core have traveled hand in hand. The premise was that CCSS would be a yardstick by which all schools could be measured, and by using it (by way of super-awesome tests) we would find out that public schools were sucky and needed to be escaped by sending students (and their money) to charter/choice/private schools.
In this newer argument, the Core is no longer a yardstick of excellence, but a straightjacket of government naughtiness. The Core used to be a tool for helping students escape terrible government schools; now it's a symbol of why government schools are terrible. This is not a new argument; it's just one that we haven't always clearly associated with the conservative fans of reforminess.
Bottom line: Reformsters who are fans of privatization and free-market voucherish solutions for the dismantling and monetization of public education-- these folks do not really need the Common Core to push their agenda, and can easily move from fighting for it to fighting against it without having to drop any other piece of their program. Alger has been beating this drum for a while; who knows when her band might suddenly get bigger.
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