The Common Core is great for the ladies.
At least that's what we can learn from a new CAP (Center for American Progress) article that combines two now-classic Core-boosting rhetorical techniques-- wacky leaps of logic, and taking credit for what was already happening.
The piece opens with a paragraph with a shout out to Title IX, then sadly shakes its head and notes that there are still gender-based inequities in education and employment persist, particularly for girls of color and from low-income background. Plus, girls often lack access to high-quality, rigorous STEMmy courses, which would prepare them for college and high-paying careers. Not that the author offers any evidence, or even an assertion, that they lack access to a higher degree than boys.
Next up: charts and data. The data is exclusively high stakes tests based, so here's what we know. More eight grade boys get proficient-ranked test scores on science tests than eight grade girls. The boys barely edge out girls on the math test results on the eight grade test. And as always, black and brown girls score lower on the test than their white counterparts. So that's a picture of how eight graders score on those two tests. What we can actually deduce from that about the entire educational system is a whole other debate. I just want to be clear on what we're actually talking about.
Fewer females than males take the AP computer science test. Few females take STEM related AP tests. Also, female students and students of color take more college remedial courses (the article lumps women and minorities together a lot). And we get a section (well, two paragraphs) of data with a chart about the pay gap between men and women. This, the article tells us, exists even when controlling for college major, hours worked, and occupation.
So wait-- how is the Common Core fixing all this? Let's go back to the introduction:
The Common Core State Standards represent an important step toward
closing achievement gaps and opening the door to higher-paying STEM
fields for millions of girls. By establishing uniform and more-rigorous
academic standards, the Common Core helps ensure that all students—both
girls and boys, regardless of their income levels and backgrounds—are
taught to the same high expectations.
This is followed by the data establishing, sort of, that the gender gap exists. Then we arrive at this conclusion.
More engaging and challenging standards build a strong academic
foundation for all students. Girls—and in particular, girls of
color—have a lot to gain from more-rigorous learning standards that
better prepare them for college and career success. By raising the
expectations for student learning, the Common Core State Standards allow
girls the opportunity to seize STEM learning opportunities while in
grade school; to pursue a diverse set of college majors; and to obtain
jobs that command higher salaries. The Common Core State Standards can
expand on the progress girls have made since Title IX and can have a
long-lasting impact on women in society.
Many of you will recognize a composition technique known as "recycling your introduction in new words as your conclusion."
That's it. That's the whole argument. CCSS will raise everybody's standards, so women (and, I guess, students of color) will just automatically be raised up to the level of white guys. Of course, that effect would theoretically work with literally any educational standards at all-- so why didn't the states (particularly those with super high standards rated by Fordham Institution as better than CCSS) already wipe out their own gender gaps? And how can rigorous education wipe out the pay gap when the pay gap, as CAP just said, is controlled for occupation? Will lady engineers suddenly be paid more because they have a Common Core seal of approval stamped upon them?
This has to be one of the laziest arguments I have ever seen for pretty much anything. I guess it's good that they didn't print a special CCSS edition in pink for girls, but the implication that girls have been doing poorly because, well, it's just that nobody asked them to do better-- it's somehow insulting to everybody. If CAP is going to try to score social justice points, they're going to have to do much better than this.
[Update 10/30] The evening that this post went up, several of us were contacted by CAP chieftain Neera Tanden who asked if anyone wanted to take issue with the data.
The answer was, of course, that the data about gender gaps were fine, but there was no data at all to indicate that CCSS could close the gap. Tanden cited gains in the College and Career Readiness Ratings for girls in Kentucky, one of the first states to adopt the Core. I asked how those gains for girls compared to gains for boys, and she referred me to this site, where Kentucky parks all their reports on student achievement.
This actually raised more questions than it answered, because the high school data clearly shows that girls outpace boys by large margins in most tested areas (boys win on the social studies test) and that the gender gap on the College and Career Ready ratings also runs in favor of the girls. I asked about this, but have yet to hear a response (it's twitter-- I don't read much into the silence). My conclusion, however, is that the CAP article profiled above makes even less sense than it did before.]
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Slow Schools
In a recent blog post, Daniel Katz made a plea for a slow schools movement (like the slow foods movement). It's a great piece and well worth your time.
Katz is the director of Secondary Education and Secondary Special Education Teacher Preparation at Seton Hall University, and he begins the post with observations about what he's hearing from his alumni when they return. They are hurried.
This is not a new problem. Teaching has always involved doing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time. People who want to say, "Yeah, just like every other profession" just don't get it. Teachers are up against finite time in a way that no other professions experience. And boy does this resonate.
The most read thing I have ever written in my life is this post about the hard part of teaching, how there is never enough. Over at HuffPost, it has pulled almost 450,000 facebook likes, and they've translated it into Italian, German and French. Nothing I have ever written in my life has come close. What that tells me is that this is a subject that really really resonates.
Teachers have always suffered from having more and more duties, tasks and responsibilities jammed into their days (and into the parts of their days that are supposed to be theirs). And as Katz correctly observes, those "new"duties are removed just about as often as governments repeal "temporary" taxes. But there is a new order of magnitude going on today.
In a policy environment that provides high stakes standardized tests the power to put teachers’ jobs in the balance and with an active movement afoot to remove teachers’ workplace protections, pressures today rival those at any point since the Common School movement began in the 19th century.
And as Katz observes, it's not just a matter of Getting Things Done, but of getting things done right.
However, the need for “slow schools” goes well beyond a simple desire to lift added and poorly thought out burdens from teachers who already had important work to do. It goes towards fundamental aspects of what learning actually requires. A productive school is one that hums with energy, but it is not the energy of people rushing anxiously from one obligation to another. It is the energy of people grappling with challenging ideas and materials, working through from what they do not understand to what they do understand, and proposing and testing new hypotheses about how the world works around them. That is a specific kind of energy that cannot happen under constant pressure to perform on command.
Thinking, understanding, coming to grips with concepts, and particular the kind of deep conceptual understanding that the Sultans of Common Core insist they want. This is one of the many self-contradictions of life under the Core-- we want you to go an inch wide and a mile deep, but we won't tell you what material you can now cut from the curriculum, mostly because we still expect you to cover everything you always covered-- just deeper and slower. We want you to drive from LA to San Francisco at 20 MPH, with a stop every hour to get out and smell the flowers, but we still expect you to leave after breakfast and get there in time for supper.
Deeper understanding takes time. Time, Katz says, that includes time for being confused and working through that confusion.
A deep and layered understanding of complex ideas cannot be forced to happen simply through intensity, although significance and deep understanding have intensity of their own. Students necessarily must be frustrated as they grapple with complex and unknown concepts, but they need time in order to work through that confusion, and when forced or hurried to move they not only fail to develop the desired understanding, but also they become needlessly frustrated and disengaged from the task of learning. Taken together, Bruner, Doyle, and Duckworth denote essential truisms about classrooms and learning: 1) students are capable of better and deeper understanding of more complex ideas than we often think they can; 2) the products, processes, and materials that support the development of that understanding are often highly ambiguous and complex to enact in a classroom; 3) confusion is an important part of the learning process, and learners need time and space to be where they are in their emerging understanding without being forced to move faster than they need.
Unfortunately, what we've got is a system that demands results Right Now. Actually, not so much demands results as demands an assortment of paperwork and data points that can stand in for results. And so we have multiple tales of teachers are commanded to spend so much time planning to teach, documenting the planning to teach, document the results of the plan, documenting the results of the teaching, and documenting the analyses of the data generated by the plan to teach-- all this to the point that the teacher literally has no time to do her actual job.
Reformsters have become like the person who asks, fifteen minutes into a first date, "Are we going to get married, or not?" The demands for results (or at least data-filled reports that pass as results) have become so urgent that we lack the proper time to get the results in the first place (but then, we don't need actual results-- just data points and reports that pass for them).
Katz is right. We do need to slow down-- not for the harried and hurried teachers, but for the students who need the time to take that slow and sometimes muddled journey to understanding. I think Katz is absolutely correct-- we need a slow schools movement.
Katz is the director of Secondary Education and Secondary Special Education Teacher Preparation at Seton Hall University, and he begins the post with observations about what he's hearing from his alumni when they return. They are hurried.
This is not a new problem. Teaching has always involved doing an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time. People who want to say, "Yeah, just like every other profession" just don't get it. Teachers are up against finite time in a way that no other professions experience. And boy does this resonate.
The most read thing I have ever written in my life is this post about the hard part of teaching, how there is never enough. Over at HuffPost, it has pulled almost 450,000 facebook likes, and they've translated it into Italian, German and French. Nothing I have ever written in my life has come close. What that tells me is that this is a subject that really really resonates.
Teachers have always suffered from having more and more duties, tasks and responsibilities jammed into their days (and into the parts of their days that are supposed to be theirs). And as Katz correctly observes, those "new"duties are removed just about as often as governments repeal "temporary" taxes. But there is a new order of magnitude going on today.
In a policy environment that provides high stakes standardized tests the power to put teachers’ jobs in the balance and with an active movement afoot to remove teachers’ workplace protections, pressures today rival those at any point since the Common School movement began in the 19th century.
And as Katz observes, it's not just a matter of Getting Things Done, but of getting things done right.
However, the need for “slow schools” goes well beyond a simple desire to lift added and poorly thought out burdens from teachers who already had important work to do. It goes towards fundamental aspects of what learning actually requires. A productive school is one that hums with energy, but it is not the energy of people rushing anxiously from one obligation to another. It is the energy of people grappling with challenging ideas and materials, working through from what they do not understand to what they do understand, and proposing and testing new hypotheses about how the world works around them. That is a specific kind of energy that cannot happen under constant pressure to perform on command.
Thinking, understanding, coming to grips with concepts, and particular the kind of deep conceptual understanding that the Sultans of Common Core insist they want. This is one of the many self-contradictions of life under the Core-- we want you to go an inch wide and a mile deep, but we won't tell you what material you can now cut from the curriculum, mostly because we still expect you to cover everything you always covered-- just deeper and slower. We want you to drive from LA to San Francisco at 20 MPH, with a stop every hour to get out and smell the flowers, but we still expect you to leave after breakfast and get there in time for supper.
Deeper understanding takes time. Time, Katz says, that includes time for being confused and working through that confusion.
A deep and layered understanding of complex ideas cannot be forced to happen simply through intensity, although significance and deep understanding have intensity of their own. Students necessarily must be frustrated as they grapple with complex and unknown concepts, but they need time in order to work through that confusion, and when forced or hurried to move they not only fail to develop the desired understanding, but also they become needlessly frustrated and disengaged from the task of learning. Taken together, Bruner, Doyle, and Duckworth denote essential truisms about classrooms and learning: 1) students are capable of better and deeper understanding of more complex ideas than we often think they can; 2) the products, processes, and materials that support the development of that understanding are often highly ambiguous and complex to enact in a classroom; 3) confusion is an important part of the learning process, and learners need time and space to be where they are in their emerging understanding without being forced to move faster than they need.
Unfortunately, what we've got is a system that demands results Right Now. Actually, not so much demands results as demands an assortment of paperwork and data points that can stand in for results. And so we have multiple tales of teachers are commanded to spend so much time planning to teach, documenting the planning to teach, document the results of the plan, documenting the results of the teaching, and documenting the analyses of the data generated by the plan to teach-- all this to the point that the teacher literally has no time to do her actual job.
Reformsters have become like the person who asks, fifteen minutes into a first date, "Are we going to get married, or not?" The demands for results (or at least data-filled reports that pass as results) have become so urgent that we lack the proper time to get the results in the first place (but then, we don't need actual results-- just data points and reports that pass for them).
Katz is right. We do need to slow down-- not for the harried and hurried teachers, but for the students who need the time to take that slow and sometimes muddled journey to understanding. I think Katz is absolutely correct-- we need a slow schools movement.
Monday, October 27, 2014
MA Committed to Chasing Teachers Away (Updated)
It seems that several states are locked in a contest to determine who can do the most to undermine and gut the teaching profession. From Florida to North Carolina to Tennessee, state governments are doing their best to find creative ways to tell professional educators to go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect any dollars.
Massachusetts has taken a bold leap forward by extending the misuse of student test scores. The proposed revisions in the licensure process are a masterpiece of bureaucratic gobbledygook, but then, they have to be-- because if the people who wrote these exquisitely stupid rules had written them plainly, it would be obvious just how foolish they are.
There are three proposed versions (A, B & C) of the new system, and they all share one piece of twisted DNA-- they link teacher evaluations to teacher licenses. Not pay level or continued employment in that particular school district-- but licensure. A couple of below-average evaluations, and you will lose your MA license to teach.
There is no profession anywhere in the country that has such astonishing rules. Good lord-- even if your manager at McDonalds decides you're not up to snuff, he doesn't blackball you from ever working in any fast food joint ever again! Yes, every profession has means of defrocking people who commit egregious and unpardonable offenses. But-- and I'm going to repeat this because I'm afraid your This Can't Be Real filter is keeping you from seeing the words that I'm typing-- Massachusetts proposes to take your license to teach away if you have a couple of low evaluations.
It will not surprise you to learn that those evaluations would include all the usual groundless baloney. Student Impact Ratings-- did your real student get better test scores than his imaginary counterpart being taught by an imaginary average teacher in a parallel universe? Did you successfully climb the paperwork mountain generated by a teacher improvement plan (duly filed with the state department that doesn't have time to do the work it has now, so good luck with the new influx of improvement plan filings)? One version of the plan even allows for factoring in student evaluations of teachers; yes, teachers, your entire career can be hanging by a thread that dangles in front of an eight-year-old with scissors.
You can read the proposed plans here -- apparently hosted by an outfit called the Keystone Center, who have this to say about themselves: "The Keystone Center was established to independently facilitate the resolution of national policy conflicts." Those conflicts seem to most often have to do with oil and gas stuff, as well as Colorado higher education and monarch butterflies. How they ended up helping Massachusetts blow up teaching careers is not clear to me. But it's easy to see how their "project partners" ended up here, because they're teamed up with TNTP, a group that never met a set of teacher job protections that they didn't want throw in a woodchipper and burn with fire.
If TNTP ever has a legitimate mission, it has long since been replaced with one single-minded focus-- to make it easier to fire all teachers everywhere all the time.
Keystone is also the "vendor and facilitator" for some "stakeholder meetings." These meetings do not appear to be designed for freewheeling stakeholder discussion.
During the upcoming stakeholder meetings, we are not asking for people to vote on or express their support or opposition to any one or more of the Policy Options. Rather, we will be asking stakeholders to identify pros and cons of each of the Policy Options as well as specific considerations or challenges and how to address these challenges.
Massachusetts Teachers Association members who attended the first of these meetings report that they are exactly the cheery railroad ride one would expect.
Members who attended the first session reported that the conversations were controlled and participants were not given the option of challenging the faulty premises being promoted by DESE. (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)
The MTA site also has some direct and strongly worded objections to all three plans, and I would recommend that the rest of us all study these because if TNTP has their nose in this business, they'll be telling all their friends across the country about this fun way to chase people out of teaching.
I would point out to the people pushing this that it's a great way to chase people away from teaching in Massachusetts ever. I would point out that young people interested in starting a teaching career might favor a state where that career can't be snuffed out because of random fake data that's beyond their control. I would point out that this is one more policy that will almost certainly make it even harder than it already is to recruit teachers for high-poverty low-achievement schools. I mean, most states are settling for evaluation systems that punish inner-city teachers with just losing that particular job; it takes big brass ones for Massachusetts to say, "Come teach in a poor struggling under-funded low-resource school. Take a chance on the job that could end your entire teaching career before you're even thirty." Who on God's green earth thinks this is a way to put a great teacher in every classroom?
Well, the answer is nobody. I would say all those things to the people pushing this program if I thought they cared about any of that. But it seems increasingly obvious that creating a massive teacher shortage is not a bug, but a feature. It's not an unintended consequence, but the chosen objective.
The MTA is a feisty group. I hope they keep fighting, and fighting hard, because if they lose this, two bad things will happen.
First, Massachusetts will become one more state where teachers choose to work only if they're forced to by personal circumstances like friends and family or if they have no other options.
Second, other reformsters in other states (near other branch offices of TNTP) will look at Massachusetts as a model to follow, and the cancer will spread.
(Update! Good news. In fact, the best. In the face of a storm of howls and opposition and, the DESE in Massachusetts has said, "Um, never mind." The memo (which I can't find a linkable copy of this morning) was pretty straightforward-- the high poobah of MA education said, "I've heard from a buttload of people voicing strong opposition and I've concluded that they're right, so we're not doing this." He has also reportedly invited MTA to continue the conversation. So this story has taken a definite turn for the better.
So now we get to learn a better lesson from this adventure-- that a strongly organized union that throws its back into pro-teacher advocacy can Get Things Done. Rather than worrying that this kind of rules change might infect other state departments of education, we can hope that this sort of strength infects other state teacher organizations (and who knows-- maybe the national ones, too.)
Massachusetts has taken a bold leap forward by extending the misuse of student test scores. The proposed revisions in the licensure process are a masterpiece of bureaucratic gobbledygook, but then, they have to be-- because if the people who wrote these exquisitely stupid rules had written them plainly, it would be obvious just how foolish they are.
There are three proposed versions (A, B & C) of the new system, and they all share one piece of twisted DNA-- they link teacher evaluations to teacher licenses. Not pay level or continued employment in that particular school district-- but licensure. A couple of below-average evaluations, and you will lose your MA license to teach.
There is no profession anywhere in the country that has such astonishing rules. Good lord-- even if your manager at McDonalds decides you're not up to snuff, he doesn't blackball you from ever working in any fast food joint ever again! Yes, every profession has means of defrocking people who commit egregious and unpardonable offenses. But-- and I'm going to repeat this because I'm afraid your This Can't Be Real filter is keeping you from seeing the words that I'm typing-- Massachusetts proposes to take your license to teach away if you have a couple of low evaluations.
It will not surprise you to learn that those evaluations would include all the usual groundless baloney. Student Impact Ratings-- did your real student get better test scores than his imaginary counterpart being taught by an imaginary average teacher in a parallel universe? Did you successfully climb the paperwork mountain generated by a teacher improvement plan (duly filed with the state department that doesn't have time to do the work it has now, so good luck with the new influx of improvement plan filings)? One version of the plan even allows for factoring in student evaluations of teachers; yes, teachers, your entire career can be hanging by a thread that dangles in front of an eight-year-old with scissors.
You can read the proposed plans here -- apparently hosted by an outfit called the Keystone Center, who have this to say about themselves: "The Keystone Center was established to independently facilitate the resolution of national policy conflicts." Those conflicts seem to most often have to do with oil and gas stuff, as well as Colorado higher education and monarch butterflies. How they ended up helping Massachusetts blow up teaching careers is not clear to me. But it's easy to see how their "project partners" ended up here, because they're teamed up with TNTP, a group that never met a set of teacher job protections that they didn't want throw in a woodchipper and burn with fire.
If TNTP ever has a legitimate mission, it has long since been replaced with one single-minded focus-- to make it easier to fire all teachers everywhere all the time.
Keystone is also the "vendor and facilitator" for some "stakeholder meetings." These meetings do not appear to be designed for freewheeling stakeholder discussion.
During the upcoming stakeholder meetings, we are not asking for people to vote on or express their support or opposition to any one or more of the Policy Options. Rather, we will be asking stakeholders to identify pros and cons of each of the Policy Options as well as specific considerations or challenges and how to address these challenges.
Massachusetts Teachers Association members who attended the first of these meetings report that they are exactly the cheery railroad ride one would expect.
Members who attended the first session reported that the conversations were controlled and participants were not given the option of challenging the faulty premises being promoted by DESE. (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)
The MTA site also has some direct and strongly worded objections to all three plans, and I would recommend that the rest of us all study these because if TNTP has their nose in this business, they'll be telling all their friends across the country about this fun way to chase people out of teaching.
I would point out to the people pushing this that it's a great way to chase people away from teaching in Massachusetts ever. I would point out that young people interested in starting a teaching career might favor a state where that career can't be snuffed out because of random fake data that's beyond their control. I would point out that this is one more policy that will almost certainly make it even harder than it already is to recruit teachers for high-poverty low-achievement schools. I mean, most states are settling for evaluation systems that punish inner-city teachers with just losing that particular job; it takes big brass ones for Massachusetts to say, "Come teach in a poor struggling under-funded low-resource school. Take a chance on the job that could end your entire teaching career before you're even thirty." Who on God's green earth thinks this is a way to put a great teacher in every classroom?
Well, the answer is nobody. I would say all those things to the people pushing this program if I thought they cared about any of that. But it seems increasingly obvious that creating a massive teacher shortage is not a bug, but a feature. It's not an unintended consequence, but the chosen objective.
The MTA is a feisty group. I hope they keep fighting, and fighting hard, because if they lose this, two bad things will happen.
First, Massachusetts will become one more state where teachers choose to work only if they're forced to by personal circumstances like friends and family or if they have no other options.
Second, other reformsters in other states (near other branch offices of TNTP) will look at Massachusetts as a model to follow, and the cancer will spread.
(Update! Good news. In fact, the best. In the face of a storm of howls and opposition and, the DESE in Massachusetts has said, "Um, never mind." The memo (which I can't find a linkable copy of this morning) was pretty straightforward-- the high poobah of MA education said, "I've heard from a buttload of people voicing strong opposition and I've concluded that they're right, so we're not doing this." He has also reportedly invited MTA to continue the conversation. So this story has taken a definite turn for the better.
So now we get to learn a better lesson from this adventure-- that a strongly organized union that throws its back into pro-teacher advocacy can Get Things Done. Rather than worrying that this kind of rules change might infect other state departments of education, we can hope that this sort of strength infects other state teacher organizations (and who knows-- maybe the national ones, too.)
PA Solicits Standards Feedback
Pennsylvania's Department of Education wants public feedback on Eligible Content, the specific skills and knowledge that are listed in the Pennsylvania (Totally Not The Common) Core Standards.
Anybody with an internet hookup can go to http://www.paacademicreview.org
and review the standards, item by item. They can give each individual item a check (for "that's just fine") or an X. With the X, you get four specific complaints that you can lodge:
* The statement should be broken up into several, more specific statements.
* The statement should be in a different grade level
* The statement should be rewritten
* The statement should be rewritten
These choices allow for written explanation, rationale, and/or suggested rewrites.
You'll be asked for an email address and to explain why you have a stake in PA standards (so knock it off, you crazy carpetbaggers), and you'll only be allowed one comment per standard per device. Right now only the third grade math and ELA standards are up, but everything is supposed to be up within the next couple of weeks. The site will be available until January 15, 2015.
The stated goals of the site are
1) Increase awareness and understanding of PA's eligible content
2) Solicit actionable feedback as part of the department's review process
3) Provide exam sample questions for teachers in the tested grade/subject
The site is almost entirely funded by Team Pennsylvania Foundation, which is an economic development group. So I'm not sure what they're doing here.
The whole thing seems extraordinarily.... reasonable. So I'm not sure what we're up to, unless this is meant to help Corbett get out from under his education albatross before the election (though the lead time is a little slim). Whatever. It's an open invitation for Pennsylvania teachers (and anybody else) to sound off to the state about the standards. It would seem a shame to waste it.
Anybody with an internet hookup can go to http://www.paacademicreview.org
and review the standards, item by item. They can give each individual item a check (for "that's just fine") or an X. With the X, you get four specific complaints that you can lodge:
* The statement should be broken up into several, more specific statements.
* The statement should be in a different grade level
* The statement should be rewritten
* The statement should be rewritten
These choices allow for written explanation, rationale, and/or suggested rewrites.
You'll be asked for an email address and to explain why you have a stake in PA standards (so knock it off, you crazy carpetbaggers), and you'll only be allowed one comment per standard per device. Right now only the third grade math and ELA standards are up, but everything is supposed to be up within the next couple of weeks. The site will be available until January 15, 2015.
The stated goals of the site are
1) Increase awareness and understanding of PA's eligible content
2) Solicit actionable feedback as part of the department's review process
3) Provide exam sample questions for teachers in the tested grade/subject
The site is almost entirely funded by Team Pennsylvania Foundation, which is an economic development group. So I'm not sure what they're doing here.
The whole thing seems extraordinarily.... reasonable. So I'm not sure what we're up to, unless this is meant to help Corbett get out from under his education albatross before the election (though the lead time is a little slim). Whatever. It's an open invitation for Pennsylvania teachers (and anybody else) to sound off to the state about the standards. It would seem a shame to waste it.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Why Aren't We Talking About Teacher Retention?
To hear some folks talk about tenure, you would think that one of the biggest issues facing education is a glut of teachers, a veritable mountain of wrinkled old classroom geezers blocking the career paths of a million Bright Young Things who are itching to get into the classroom. Oh, if only tenure and FILO didn't allow them to sit there in lumpen uselessness while hot young blood congeals somewhere else, unused potential unrealized.
All the way back to She Who Will Not Be Named and her Time cover appearance, broom in hand, the prevailing image has been of the need to sweep away the tenure-protected deadwood. It's a compelling image-- it's just not closely related to reality.
The Economic Policy Institute thinks we don't even have enough teaching jobs. By their count, we should have 377,000 more job openings, which I'm pretty sure would take care of every enthusiastic twenty-something who's allegedly languishing somewhere.
On top of that, we are losing somewhere in the neighborhood of a half million teachers each year. Everybody likes to quote the two most striking data points-- fifty percent of new teachers leave within five years, and twenty percent of new teachers leave within the first three years. Recently TFA made the argument that their two-year teachers stay in a classroom longer than most traditional teacher school grads. That may or may not be accurate, but it's certainly close enough to give one pause. Meanwhile, I can report first-hand that many college education programs are shriveling up and, if not outright dying, becoming shambling zombie shadows of their former selves.
This report from April highlights some of the trends. The teacher force is very female, and very white. In other words, the teacher population looks less and less like the student population. And there's no good news to report there, either. Black men are entering the profession in huge numbers and leaving it in even huger numbers.
And into this picture we have Silicon Valley moguls telling us that the problem with education is that we can't fire people enough.
You will occasionally hear a stat thrown around along the lines of "Last year in North Pennsyltucky, only twelve teachers were fired out of sixty gabbillion employed in the state." This is supposed to alarm us with the slackitude of schools' firing skills, and serve as proof that zillions of terrible teachers are still in the classroom, lazily tenured and blissfully unfired. This is baloney. I will admit that when I entered teaching, it was a field where a lazy person could hide and while away the time until retirement. But that was thirty-some years ago; today teachers have to slog away just to keep their heads above water. The high attrition rate for beginning teachers tells me that many young men and women are saying, "Damn-- this is hard work that I don't think I can do very well. I'm outta here!" I believe a huge number of not-so-awsome proto-teachers are showing themselves the door before anybody else has to.
Why else are we hemorrhaging teachers? In that study linked above, Richard Ingersoll wrote this:
In short, the data suggest that school staffing problems are rooted in the way schools are organized and the way the teaching occupation is treated and that lasting improvements in the quality and quantity of the teaching workforce will require improvements in the quality of the teaching job.
In other words, making teaching jobs crappier and less secure is not likely to get people to stick around.
New York City schools played with the tenure thing, creating a sort of tenure twilight. Some folks thought a study of the system proved that you could get weaker teachers to go away on their own. I'm pretty sure that it proved you could get any teachers to go away if you told them they had no job security in their present location.
Everything-- everything-- tells us that if our goal really is to put a great teacher in every classroom, reformsters, educational thought leaders, and rich unelected amateurs who somehow get to set education policy are going about it exactly backwards. The attacks on tenure are literally the exact opposite of what is needed.
Of course, if the actual goal is to give schools a labor force that is cheaper and more easily controlled, then we are right on track. If we are trying to manufacture a staffing crisis so that we can say that we must issue emergency teaching credentials to all sentient beings in America, then we are on the right track. If we are trying to chase teachers away from large urban districts so that those districts (and their big beautiful piles of money) can be divied up by charter privateers, we are on the right track.
But if we want to talk about improving the teaching force, about making it better resemble the student population, about putting great teachers in front of all students-- if we want to talk about those things, then we need to stop talking about tenure and start talking about retention. What people actually choose to talk about tells us a great deal about their actual goals.
All the way back to She Who Will Not Be Named and her Time cover appearance, broom in hand, the prevailing image has been of the need to sweep away the tenure-protected deadwood. It's a compelling image-- it's just not closely related to reality.
The Economic Policy Institute thinks we don't even have enough teaching jobs. By their count, we should have 377,000 more job openings, which I'm pretty sure would take care of every enthusiastic twenty-something who's allegedly languishing somewhere.
On top of that, we are losing somewhere in the neighborhood of a half million teachers each year. Everybody likes to quote the two most striking data points-- fifty percent of new teachers leave within five years, and twenty percent of new teachers leave within the first three years. Recently TFA made the argument that their two-year teachers stay in a classroom longer than most traditional teacher school grads. That may or may not be accurate, but it's certainly close enough to give one pause. Meanwhile, I can report first-hand that many college education programs are shriveling up and, if not outright dying, becoming shambling zombie shadows of their former selves.
This report from April highlights some of the trends. The teacher force is very female, and very white. In other words, the teacher population looks less and less like the student population. And there's no good news to report there, either. Black men are entering the profession in huge numbers and leaving it in even huger numbers.
And into this picture we have Silicon Valley moguls telling us that the problem with education is that we can't fire people enough.
You will occasionally hear a stat thrown around along the lines of "Last year in North Pennsyltucky, only twelve teachers were fired out of sixty gabbillion employed in the state." This is supposed to alarm us with the slackitude of schools' firing skills, and serve as proof that zillions of terrible teachers are still in the classroom, lazily tenured and blissfully unfired. This is baloney. I will admit that when I entered teaching, it was a field where a lazy person could hide and while away the time until retirement. But that was thirty-some years ago; today teachers have to slog away just to keep their heads above water. The high attrition rate for beginning teachers tells me that many young men and women are saying, "Damn-- this is hard work that I don't think I can do very well. I'm outta here!" I believe a huge number of not-so-awsome proto-teachers are showing themselves the door before anybody else has to.
Why else are we hemorrhaging teachers? In that study linked above, Richard Ingersoll wrote this:
In short, the data suggest that school staffing problems are rooted in the way schools are organized and the way the teaching occupation is treated and that lasting improvements in the quality and quantity of the teaching workforce will require improvements in the quality of the teaching job.
In other words, making teaching jobs crappier and less secure is not likely to get people to stick around.
New York City schools played with the tenure thing, creating a sort of tenure twilight. Some folks thought a study of the system proved that you could get weaker teachers to go away on their own. I'm pretty sure that it proved you could get any teachers to go away if you told them they had no job security in their present location.
Everything-- everything-- tells us that if our goal really is to put a great teacher in every classroom, reformsters, educational thought leaders, and rich unelected amateurs who somehow get to set education policy are going about it exactly backwards. The attacks on tenure are literally the exact opposite of what is needed.
Of course, if the actual goal is to give schools a labor force that is cheaper and more easily controlled, then we are right on track. If we are trying to manufacture a staffing crisis so that we can say that we must issue emergency teaching credentials to all sentient beings in America, then we are on the right track. If we are trying to chase teachers away from large urban districts so that those districts (and their big beautiful piles of money) can be divied up by charter privateers, we are on the right track.
But if we want to talk about improving the teaching force, about making it better resemble the student population, about putting great teachers in front of all students-- if we want to talk about those things, then we need to stop talking about tenure and start talking about retention. What people actually choose to talk about tells us a great deal about their actual goals.
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 tenurerepeal 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.
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
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.
Burden of Proof
We Americans have uneasy relationships with many of our most cherished laws and traditions. For instance, that pesky First Amendment-- can't we just limit freedom of speech to people who aren't stupid and wrong?
We also have trouble with the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing. We all agree that you shouldn't jump to conclusions, but, man, when you just know that somebody is guilty, why should we have to bother with all this convoluted due process crap?
The framers had a pretty good idea how quickly things can go south without the presumption of innocence. Because when you presume, guilt, the whole focus, the whole purpose of the process completely changes.
Remember pressing? You might remember it from the case of Giles Corey, one of the Salem residents accused of witchcraft. Corey would not confess to witchery, and so the authorities tried to get a plea out of him by simply piling more and more slabs of rock on top of him. Instead of confessing, Corey died.
See, if we start with the assumption that a person is innocent, then the process involves figuring out the truth, whatever it might be. But if we start with the assumption that the person is guilty, then the process is about getting him to admit it, and since we already "know" that he's a guilty, guilty Bad Guy, anything we do to get a confession out of him is okay. Tricks? Sure-- we're trying to "catch" him being guilty, not find out what actually is going on. Torture? Doesn't matter-- it's just a down payment on his punishment. In a system that presumes guilt, we may never get at the truth, because we aren't even looking for it. We just head directly into the punishment phase.
It's all about burden of proof. If we assume that I'm innocent until we know otherwise, then you shoulder the burden of proving that I'm not. If we assume I'm guilty, then I have the burden to somehow prove that I'm not.
The attempt to change teacher evaluation in this country doesn't just represent a change in focus or technique. Some reformsters are trying to shift the burden of proof. "More than half the students in New York State failed the Big Test," exclaim Campbell Brown et al. "That means that more than half the teachers in New York State must suck." And so we set out to design a system in which teachers are assumed to be incompetent until they can prove otherwise. And that means a gotcha system, a pressing system, a system that is not interested in getting an accurate picture of what is going on in the classroom. "Accurate picture?" scoffs CBET. "We have an accurate picture-- crappy teachers are everywhere and they're stinking up the joint. Now, prove you're not one of them."
I believe some reformsters believe that student test results are actual useful data (they're dead wrong, but they believe it). But I also believe that some reformsters like using test data because it will give them the results that they already presume are true. They already know the "truth" (public school teachers are terrible), so a "good" evaluation system is one that "proves" what they already "know."
This shifting the burden of proof to teachers blinds the system, because we're no longer trying to find out what's actually happening in classrooms. We're just trying to catch teachers being "bad."
Worse, the same attitude trickles down through the system. American students are all terrible, right, because they're trapped in failing schools. We alllllll know that, right? So when, for instance, New York claims that almost three quarters of NY students are failures, reformsters don't leap up and say, "What the hell! Are you sure that's right?" and demand a more careful look at where those figures came from. No, it just confirms what they already "know" to be true. If somebody (say, one of the students who was just labeled a failure) wants to prove they're not a failure, the burden is on the student.
This is the essence of bad assessment, particularly for young children. Part of the idea of authentic assessment (for you young folks, that's an approach to assessment that was just gathering steam when No Child Left Behind came along and stabbed it in the heart) was that for teachers to approach assessment by asking, "What would be the best way for me to allow the student to reveal what she knows or can do?" High stakes standardized testing says to the child, "Prove to me that you're not a loser."
As I said, particularly rough on small children. Barring any kind of abusive home life, it has never occurred to a seven-year-old that she sucks, let alone that she should be prepared with an affirmative defense to prove she doesn't.
For a small child, the idea that the world sucks and she also sucks is serious news. But for children of any age, establishing that they're in an adversarial relationship with an education system that considers them broken and stupid unless they can prove otherwise is not helpful for anyone. Nor is it useful to employ a system of tests designed to "reveal" as much failure as possible. It's teacher 101-- success experiences create more success.
Tell students that they're failures over and over and over again and many will buckle under the heavy burden of proving that they aren't. And in the crazy world of reformsterism, reformsters speak as if they understand the importance of expectations, and then support a system that says plainly to students, "We expect most of you to fail."
A justice system that puts the burden of proof in the wrong place will collapse under its own badly distributed weight. It will fail to do its job, fail to find the truth, fail to support the innocent. An education system that makes the same mistake will yield similar results.
We also have trouble with the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing. We all agree that you shouldn't jump to conclusions, but, man, when you just know that somebody is guilty, why should we have to bother with all this convoluted due process crap?
The framers had a pretty good idea how quickly things can go south without the presumption of innocence. Because when you presume, guilt, the whole focus, the whole purpose of the process completely changes.
Remember pressing? You might remember it from the case of Giles Corey, one of the Salem residents accused of witchcraft. Corey would not confess to witchery, and so the authorities tried to get a plea out of him by simply piling more and more slabs of rock on top of him. Instead of confessing, Corey died.
See, if we start with the assumption that a person is innocent, then the process involves figuring out the truth, whatever it might be. But if we start with the assumption that the person is guilty, then the process is about getting him to admit it, and since we already "know" that he's a guilty, guilty Bad Guy, anything we do to get a confession out of him is okay. Tricks? Sure-- we're trying to "catch" him being guilty, not find out what actually is going on. Torture? Doesn't matter-- it's just a down payment on his punishment. In a system that presumes guilt, we may never get at the truth, because we aren't even looking for it. We just head directly into the punishment phase.
It's all about burden of proof. If we assume that I'm innocent until we know otherwise, then you shoulder the burden of proving that I'm not. If we assume I'm guilty, then I have the burden to somehow prove that I'm not.
The attempt to change teacher evaluation in this country doesn't just represent a change in focus or technique. Some reformsters are trying to shift the burden of proof. "More than half the students in New York State failed the Big Test," exclaim Campbell Brown et al. "That means that more than half the teachers in New York State must suck." And so we set out to design a system in which teachers are assumed to be incompetent until they can prove otherwise. And that means a gotcha system, a pressing system, a system that is not interested in getting an accurate picture of what is going on in the classroom. "Accurate picture?" scoffs CBET. "We have an accurate picture-- crappy teachers are everywhere and they're stinking up the joint. Now, prove you're not one of them."
I believe some reformsters believe that student test results are actual useful data (they're dead wrong, but they believe it). But I also believe that some reformsters like using test data because it will give them the results that they already presume are true. They already know the "truth" (public school teachers are terrible), so a "good" evaluation system is one that "proves" what they already "know."
This shifting the burden of proof to teachers blinds the system, because we're no longer trying to find out what's actually happening in classrooms. We're just trying to catch teachers being "bad."
Worse, the same attitude trickles down through the system. American students are all terrible, right, because they're trapped in failing schools. We alllllll know that, right? So when, for instance, New York claims that almost three quarters of NY students are failures, reformsters don't leap up and say, "What the hell! Are you sure that's right?" and demand a more careful look at where those figures came from. No, it just confirms what they already "know" to be true. If somebody (say, one of the students who was just labeled a failure) wants to prove they're not a failure, the burden is on the student.
This is the essence of bad assessment, particularly for young children. Part of the idea of authentic assessment (for you young folks, that's an approach to assessment that was just gathering steam when No Child Left Behind came along and stabbed it in the heart) was that for teachers to approach assessment by asking, "What would be the best way for me to allow the student to reveal what she knows or can do?" High stakes standardized testing says to the child, "Prove to me that you're not a loser."
As I said, particularly rough on small children. Barring any kind of abusive home life, it has never occurred to a seven-year-old that she sucks, let alone that she should be prepared with an affirmative defense to prove she doesn't.
For a small child, the idea that the world sucks and she also sucks is serious news. But for children of any age, establishing that they're in an adversarial relationship with an education system that considers them broken and stupid unless they can prove otherwise is not helpful for anyone. Nor is it useful to employ a system of tests designed to "reveal" as much failure as possible. It's teacher 101-- success experiences create more success.
Tell students that they're failures over and over and over again and many will buckle under the heavy burden of proving that they aren't. And in the crazy world of reformsterism, reformsters speak as if they understand the importance of expectations, and then support a system that says plainly to students, "We expect most of you to fail."
A justice system that puts the burden of proof in the wrong place will collapse under its own badly distributed weight. It will fail to do its job, fail to find the truth, fail to support the innocent. An education system that makes the same mistake will yield similar results.
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