Mentors Trump Policy

In the edubloggoverse, we spend huge amounts of time debating and discussing educational policy and philosophy. And yet so few of us who work in actual classrooms are directly shaped or influenced by these sorts of discussions.

This week, I was reminded of the relative unimportance of such high-fallutin' discussions because Paul Zolbrod found me on facebook.

Dr. Zolbrod was one of my English professors when I was a student at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and he taught me a great deal about how to be a teacher. As an undergrad, I knew I wanted to teach, but I had trouble getting my act together. I particularly remember the experience of stopping by his office to pick up a paper (maybe more than once) that could justifiably have been labeled "lacking in support and development" or "more pre-occupied with getting it done than thinking it through," or even that old standard, "crap." But Dr. Zolbrod had the gift of telling you where you had gone wrong and why your paper had missed the mark, yet somehow making you leave the office feeling strong and tough and ready to Be More Awesome next time. Getting feedback on bad papers made me feel like I really had something going on; I can only imagine that had I ever written a really good paper for him, my head would have exploded.

What I learned was that you do not help people grow large by making them feel small. You do not shame people into excellence.

The other thing I remember about him was that he clearly saw strengths in me that I could not see in myself, and he found ways to push me toward those strengths. Because of him, I had the experience of teaching Beowulf to elementary gifted kids and Arthurian tales in a local high school. He helped me find paths to the material that really interested me, even though it wasn't where his own emphasis lay (he wrote the most complete and important translation of the Navajo creation story in modern times). He really inspired me to be me, not a knock-off version of anyone else.

I was not a top student in the department, nor was I one of his top students or close mentees. He did all this for me, and as near as I could tell, I was just one more student in his class, and I think my experience of his teaching was a common one.

So from Dr. Zolbrod I learned that a good teacher is there for every student, helping each one see what is best in him, helping him grow without imposing your own vision of what he should grow to be.

Much of what I carry into a classroom comes from places like that. Joe Stewart taught me that you keep your expectations high at all times, and students will rise to them. Ed Frye taught me that you trust students to be responsible and give them room to breathe and rise and lead. Mike Eichholtz taught me that if you are passionate and excited about what you're teaching, your students will be, too, no matter what it is. Jack Ferrang taught me the value of establishing a classroom culture that values smarts. Tony Bianchi taught me the power of patience and letting students move at their own speed. And Janet O'Keefe made me want to be an English teacher in the first place, by showing just how wide and deep and rich a world an English teacher gets to play in.

The list goes on and on, and much of what I learned from the men and women who inspired me turned up in education textbooks, professional training sessions, long philosophical discussions of how a teacher should teach. But nothing in all the verbage ever impressed me in the same way that living, breathing examples did.

We can talk all day about how to develop teacher training programs (and, of course, make them super-duper rigorous). We can discuss what policies and procedures will best reshape the face of education. But at the end of the day, it's teachers in the classroom who are the face of education, and as much as we have studied and prepared and practiced and studied some more, we are shaped by the great teachers who came before us.

All the policies and programs and initiatives and legislated mandates in the world don't change that. Policies and mandates can get in the way of the shaping, but in the end, it's relationships that make the difference.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Economist Hansuhek Gets It Wrong Again

When you want a bunch of legit-sounding baloney about education, call up an economist. I can't think of a single card-carrying economist who has produced useful insights about education, schools and teaching, but from Brookings to the Hoover Institute, economists can be counted on to provide a regular stream of fecund fertilizer about schools.

So here comes Eric Hanushek in the New York Times (staging one of their op-ed debates, which tend to resemble a soccer game played on the side of a mountain) to offer yet another rehash of his ideas about teaching. The Room for Debate pieces are always brief, but Hansuhek impressively gets a whole ton of wrong squeezed into a tiny space. Here's his opening paragaph:

Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.

This is a research puzzler of epic proportions. Hansuhek is saying, "We do not know how to tell the difference between a green apple and a red apple, but we have conclusive proof that a red apple tastes better." Exactly what would that experimental design look like? Exactly how do you compare the red and green apples if you can't tell them apart?

The research gets around this issue by using a circular design. We first define high quality teachers as those whose students get high test scores. Then we study these high quality teachers and discover that they get students to score well on tests. It's amazing!

Economists have been at the front of the parade declaring that teachers cannot be judged on qualifications or anything else except results. Here's a typical quote, this time from a Rand economist: "The best way to assess teachers' effectiveness is to look at their on-the-job performance, including what they do in the classroom and how much progress their students make on achievement tests."

It's economists who have given us the widely debunked shell game that is Valued Added Measuring of teachers, and they've been peddling that snake oil for a while (here's a research summary from 2005).  It captures all the wrong thinking of economists in one destructive ball-- all that matters about teachers is the test scores they produce, and every other factor that affects a student's test score can be worked out in a fancy equation.

And after all that, experts (and economists pretending to be experts) have figured that a teacher affects somewhere between 7.5% and 20% of the student outcome.

Now when Hanushek says that teachers make a huge difference, he is obliquely referencing his own crazy-pants assertion that having a good first grade teacher will make you almost a million bucks richer over your lifetime (you can also find the same baloney being sliced by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff). Both researchers demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of the difference between correlation and causation.

Remember that, as always, they believe that "test scores" equal "student achievement." They note that students who get high test scores grow up to make more money. Clearly, the test scores cause the more-money-making, right? Or could it be that (as we already know) students from wealthier backgrounds do better on standardized tests, and that students from wealthier backgrounds tend to grow up to be wealthy adults?

So, in short, what we know about the "huge difference" created by Hansuhek's idea of a "good teacher" is pretty much jack and also squat. But he's going to build a house on this sand sculpture of a foundation.

Without knowing the background, preparation or attributes that make a good teacher, we cannot rely on the credentialing process to regulate the quality of people who enter the profession. Therefore the most sensible approach is to expand the pool of potential teachers but tighten up on decisions about retention, tenure and rewards for staying in teaching.

Since we don't know how to spot good teachers, says Hanushek, we should get a bunch of people to enter the profession and then throw a bunch of them out. This is a fascinating approach, and what I really want to see is the kind of promotional brochures that Hanushek would help college programs design. "Come run up over $100K of debt on the off chance that you might be one of the lucky few to get a career in teaching." Or maybe "Do you think teaching might be the work you want to do, maybe? Well, don't get your heart set on it, but do commit to years of expensive education to test the waters." How does a career counselor even approach this subject? "We'd like all of you to commit to this profession with the understanding that we plan to find half of you unfit for it." How exactly do you talk a student into pursuing a career that you don't think he's fit for?

Evaluation of teacher performance becomes key. Gains in student achievement should be one element, because improving student achievement is what we are trying to do, but this is not even possible for most teachers. Moreover, nobody believes that decisions should be made just on test scores. What we need is some combination of supervisor judgments with the input of professional evaluators.

What? What??!! Improving student achievement aka test scores is what we're trying to do? First, which "we" do you mean, exactly, because I certainly didn't enter teaching dreaming of increasing standardized tests scores. And what do you mean "this is not even possible for most teachers"? I mean, it could be a sensible statement, acknowledging that most teachers do not teach subjects that are measured by the Big Standardized Test. And if "nobody believes" that the judgment should be made just on test scores, why would you say that raising test scores is "what we're trying to do"?

And "professional evaluators"? Really. That's a thing? People whose profession is just evaluating teachers? How do you get that job? How do you prepare for that job? Is that what we're going to do with all the people we talked into pursuing teaching as a career just so we could have excess to wash out?

Hansuhek closes by trotting out DC schools as an example of how the test and punish, carrot and stick system works so super well. Would that be the system that was revamped to not include test scores because they were such a mess? Or is he thinking of the good old days when She Who Will Not Be Named used the system to spread fear and loathing, creating an atmosphere ripe for rampant cheating?

There's no evidence, anywhere, that test-based accountability improves schools. None. Not a bit. Not when it's used for "merit pay," not when it's used for hiring and firing decisions, not when it's used for any system of carrots and sticks. Nor could there be evidence, because the only "evidence" folks like Hanushek are looking at is test scores, and test scores are a measure of one thing, and one thing only-- how well students score on the Big Standardized Test. And there is not a link anywhere that those test scores mean anything else (and that would include looking back to the days when US low test scores somehow didn't stand in the way of US economic and international success).

It's tired baloney, baloney sliced so thin that it's easy to see through it. You may want to argue that I am just a high school English teacher, so what do I know about big-brained economics stuff. I'd say that if a high school English teacher can see the big fat hole is your weak economist-generated argument, that just tells you how weak the argument is. Hansuhek has become one of those go-to "experts" whose continued credibility is a mystery to me. He may an intelligent man, a man who treats his mother well, and is fun to hang out with. But his arguments about education are baseless and unsupportable. If you're going to read any portion of the NYT debate, I recommend you skip over Hanushek and check out the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, whose piece is much more closely tied to reality.

The Heavy Federal Hand

Chicago Public Schools caved.

The district's CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett was holding out for a limited rollout of the PARCC, administering the widely unloved Big Standardized Mess of a Test to only 10% of CPS students. But the Chicago system has backed down.

It has not backed down because leaders saw the error of their ways. There was no 11th hour meeting in which test designers hunkered down with school officials to show them how the test is actually swell. There was no last-minute visit from educational experts to help Chicago schools see how the PARCC has great educational advantages and will serve the needs of Chicago students.

There were just threats. Threats from Arne Duncan's Department of Education. Threats from the federal government.

Duncan's USED likes to adopt a stance that they are just uninvolved bystanders in the Great Ed Reform Discussion. Common Core and the other reformster programs like charter boosting and Big Standardized Tests were voluntarily adopted by the states. Says Duncan's office, "Federal overreach wielding a big fat stick? Moi?? Surely vous jests."

But just as Dolores Umbridge occasionally snaps and drops her cheery facade to reveal the raging control freak underneath, the USED occasionally puts its foot down and demands obedience, or else.

They did it to Washington State when legislators refused to install a teacher evaluation program that Duncan approved of. And now they've done it to Chicago schools.

"Give the test we want, the way we want it given," comes word from DC, "Or we will take away $1.4 billion from your system. Do as we say, or the big stick comes out."

And so CPS folded, and I can't say that I blame them. Taking a stand is a great thing, but making he students of your district take a $1.4 billion dollar cut to do it is a heck of a big stand to take, and probably not responsible behavior for district leaders.

Was their principled stand a waste? Not at all. For one thing, people have seen one of America's largest school systems cast a huge vote of No Confidence in the Big Standardized Test. For another, Americans have one more chance to see the heavy hand of the feds revealed again. There's no pretending that anything happened here other than federal extortion-- do as we say, or we cut you. It's one more clear picture of where modern ed reform really came from and what really keeps it alive, and it's one more motivator for Congress to get ESEA rewritten.

It is true that the meanest, craziest person in the room gets to control the conversation. But they can only do it by revealing how mean and crazy they are, and in the long run that earns them neither friends nor allies. To use their heavy hand, they had to show their true face. They may win the battle, but they position themselves badly for the war.

A Win for Pennsylvania's New Governor

Many of us have been waiting to see just how new PA Governor Tom Wolf lands on the charter vs. public school issue.

In PA, it is very much a versus issue-- charters and public schools are in competition for the exact same tax dollars, making it a zero sum game, and every student who leaves a public school for a charter represents a loss in revenue far in excess of the actual reduction in costs for the district.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Philadelphia, where charters have made themselves fat by sucking the blood from the city school system. This process has been facilitated by the nature of the district itself-- Philadelphia was one of the first large city school systems to be stripped of any semblance of democracy, its voters disempowered and its school board replaced by the School Reform Commission, a group of five political appointees who are appointed by either the governor or the mayor and who have the power to make charter operators' big green dreams come true.

The SRC has occasionally employed tactics that include the flat out illegal move of unilaterally changing the teacher contract. But even the SRC had started to notice that charters are part of their problem. 

So has the new governor, who requested that SRC not approve any new charters in this go-round because the Philly schools can't afford to be bled any more. Twenty-seven were up for consideration, with PA GOP legislators lobbying for a large number. The SRC went ahead and okayed five.

And so late Sunday, word came out that Wolf has replaced Bill Green, the former chair of the SRC, with Marjorie Neff, a retired principal and only member of the SRC to vote no on all five charters.

Green is going to take his dis-appointment to court. It's not clear how he would win that suit (the chair of the SRC is appointed by the governor), and he still gets to serve on the board.

But at the very least, Wolf, who has strong ties to the charter school community back in his native York, PA, has at least made a statement other than, "Line up charter operators-- it's Christmas!" which unfortunately has been the official position of the past few PA governors.

Early reports suggest that his budget proposal (to be announced later today) will include a boost of state funding for public schools and increased charter oversight (increased charter oversight has been proposed in PA before, but coupled with increased charter profitability, so we'll see). I am still watching and waiting, but this certainly doesn't look like a bad sign.

Charter Influence in PA

Charters have huge direct and indirect influence in Pennsylvania. Some of that is shown in a great Daniel Simmons-Ritchie piece at PennLive looking at how the big boys of charterdom play high stakes hardball in Pennsylvania.

PennLive's analysis shows about $10 million going out to PA politicians over the last nine years. It is a measure of how accustomed we have become to the throwing around of money in the education biz that the amount doesn't seem all that huge.

State Rep Bernie O'Neill of Bucks County told PennLive that in addition to their ability to throw money at their problems, charters are also shameless about deploying children as lobbyists. Eva Moskowitz is only one of the more famous of these practitioners, closing her schools so that he students can be bused to the state capital to lobby for her interests.

O'Neill notes that it's an easy sell. Just tell small children and their parents that some mean guys in the capitol want to close their school, and they'll be making posters and phone calls and trips.

Pennsylvania charters have perfected the profitability dodge. PA schools must be non-profit, but that means nothing-- Gotrocks Ed, Inc simply sets up Nonprofit School Biz as a company to file the application and be the charter operator of record, but then NSB simply turns around and hires Gotrocks to run the school, an operation on which Gotrocks makes a handy bundle.

Some of that bundle is used to grease the wheels of government. Vahan Gureghian is the CEO of a charter school company. He's also the second-highest individual contributor to Tom Corbett's campaign; after Corbett won, Gureghian was appointed to two transition team committees, including education.

The charter lobby influence is not always as obvious as its support of vouchers or Educational Improvement Tax Credits (voucher lite). One of Gureghian's charter schools was among those caught in the investigation of schools suspected of cheating on the Big Test, but unlike other schools, Gureghian's company was allowed to investigate itself. Shockingly, they were not found guilty of anything.

O'Neill's commission made a recommendation to scale special education student funding by need. Students with mild special needs but who still get full funding transfers are the great cash cows of the charter business in Pennsylvania. Charters have fought the recommendation.

"They're saying, 'If we lose this money our doors are going to close.' " O'Neill said. "Well then, there's something wrong with your business model if you're relying on keeping your doors open on the backs of special-education students."

It will come as no surprise that O'Neill has been the target of charter lobby attempts to unseat him.

Charter lobbying can be subtle, and the effects of charter reformster rhetoric on public education will be put to a new test in Pennsylvania soon.

Governor Tom Wolf's budget proposal will reportedly address Pennsylvania's public education funding problems. Currently the state covers just over a third of local school costs, meaning that poor districts experience huge effects of their own poverty (this is how York schools end up so poor that the state can propose taking them over). Wolf would like to see the state shoulder 50% of the cost.

That's a great thought-- but it means that the roughly $9 billion provided by the state will need to get closer to $13 billion, and that money will have to come from somewhere.

Pennsylvania is a state with considerable post-parent population-- folks whose kids have long since left school. But the rhetoric of charter proponents has drilled into the public that a school is a service provided to an individual student and her parents. Charters have tried hard to normalize the concept that tax dollars do not go to support community schools, but instead go to little Chris and Pat to go buy themselves an education somewhere.

Charter and voucher systems are all about disenfranchising taxpayers. Now we'll see how those taxpayers react to a larger bill for services that some have been conned into thinking has nothing to do with them. "Why should I pay more taxes? I don't have any kids in school."

If charter and voucher boosters have been successful in selling their message of child-centered funding in place of taxpayers supporting schools as a public service for the whole community, we can expect Wolf's ambitious idea to be an even tougher sell than it would have been.

This will mark one more way in which charter profiteers have made public education a little bit worse in Pennsylvania.

Live by the sword...

So CPAC happened this week, at which various GOP future candidates try to see if they can win a little conservative love. And that means that Common Core had to be trotted out for ceremonial abuse, like a disgraced former party officer in Communist China.

There was a CPAC panel that addressed the Core, and Patrick Brennan at National Review said it was "...not good." The American Conservative also covered the panel, which included such educational experts as Phyllis Schafly.

The panel featured that kind of Common Core opposition that creates a bit of a conundrum for those of us who support traditional public education. Because some of the people who oppose Common Core are (and I'm sorry to say this, because some of you are readers of this blog) peddling baloney. This is how challenging the Common Core debate has become-- here we are standing in front of our house telling our neighbor, "Do not take that sack of poisonous snakes into your home with your family," and we find ourselves joined on the sidewalk by another neighbor who joins in, hollering, "Yeah, don't take those snakes in there! They will make all the electrical circuits spit blood and cause your paint to peel."

So CPAC included people who somehow blamed CCSS for the teaching of sex education and evolution, as well as the usual concerns about informational reading being code for liberal propaganda. This was intermixed with legitimate points, such as the observation that there's not a lick of evidence to support the notion that broadly-accepted standards fix much of anything.

But mostly what CPAC featured re: Common Core was the Whiplash Brigade, a group of aspiring Presidential wanna-bes who lined up to take pot-shots at the policy initiative that had been, just a few years ago, their educational BFF. Haley Sweetland Edwards at Time noted the phenomenon that featured all the candidate hopefuls downplaying, distancing and demolishing their previous CCSS support. Well, all but one. Jeb Bush continues to signal that he is prepared to fight and die on Mount Common Core. Bush, however, reportedly depends on busloads of high-priced friends to back him, so that battle is not going well.

So who will hold Jindal and Christie and Walker and Huckabee accountable for their flip-floppage?

None other than newly-minted reformstress Campbell Brown, who took to the pages of the Washington Post to throw the "P" word at the assembled hopefuls-- pandering.

Pandering is a great word. Its definition, of course, is "offering support for a policy with which I disagree." Politicians who support policies I agree with are showing wisdom and vision, or at a minimum, smart realpolitik sense.

Brown lays out the history of Jindal and Christie re: Common Core and boils their defection down to this sentence:

All this, of course, is not about education. Or facts. 

Her outrage that these politicians are making political choices for political reasons mirrors an argument often used by reformsters in arguments about the Core-- why are you bringing up these political points? why make this issue about politics instead of discussing the educational merits?

How dare these politicians abandon CCSS because desertion id politically expedient?

Well, those who live by political expediency die by political expediency.

Jindal, Christie, Walker, and a host of other politicians did not ever support the Core because they had looked at it and determined that it was a sound educational package. They did not have a team of blue ribbon teachers examine the standards in order to render a solid educational judgment by which politicians might be guided. Heck, in many cases, the governors threw state support behind the standards before they were even written!

Nor were the CCSS birthed in education in the first place. They were created by corporate interests at the behest of politicians (or maybe vice versa). From the earliest sparks, they were created with an eye on the political angle, not by asking how can we create great educational standards, but how can we get some standards adopted by the entire country.

State leaders were convinced that it would be politically expedient to adopt the standards, that like most political education playmaking, there would be plenty of upside and no downside (remember those days not so long ago when saying you were for better schools did not start a cranky debate?). The leaders would adopt the standards, the standards would be driven down through the educational system, and leaders would get to call themselves part of a great transformative movement that made US education awesome.

Guys like Jindal and Christie were never looking at the educational effects or the best interests of students. They were doing political calculus, and the CCSS forefathers were cheering them on.

It's very hard to change the rules of these games in mid-contest. Core proponents wanted the standards to become victorious in a game played by the rules of politics and power, and that's what they got. Sad for them that they didn't anticipate how those rules could work against them one day, but they can't cry "foul" because no foul. By the rules of the game they set out to play, dropping the core because it's politically expedient to do so is right there in the rulebook.

The Trouble with Belief

Belief is a big part of the reformster narrative put forth by the administration and its various proxies. The problem with low-achieving minority students and students with special needs, goes the narrative, is that both individual teachers and the institution of school itself do not believe that these students can learn or grow or achieve, and therefor they are denied a full-on education.

At the heart of this narrative is something that is absolutely, undeniably true-- so undeniably true that I don't know a single competent teacher who denies it.

To teach students, you must believe that they can learn. The degree to which you believe in their power and potential has a huge effect on what those students will actually achieve.

I think we would be hard-pressed to find anybody who disagrees with that. But once we get past that point, we start to encounter a great deal of argument and disagreement.

Some of the disagreement is manufactured, the result of a new attempt to use belief to bolster the stance of reformsters, particularly those in the charter camp. The stance goes something like this: "This charter school has achieved great and wonderful success. If you question our statements about that success, it can only be because you don't believe that our students could possibly be that successful." This is another variation on the Condoleezza Rice "charter opponents are racists" argument; it's not about establishing a dialogue, but about shutting people up.

In fact, we know the secrets of charter success, and one of them is the exact opposite of believing all students can learn. It's the secret most clearly articulated by Mike Petrilli of the Fordham, and that story goes something like this: in every low-achieving under-served school you will find a mix of students who could really achieve and students who are part of the problem, so we should use charters to rescue the students who can actually accomplish something.

Where charters succeed (or do at least as well as their public counterparts) it is because they believe only in certain students who meet certain qualifications and behave in certain ways and produce certain results. There are very few charters out there using a sales pitch of, "We believe that all students can succeed and we will accept any and all students and keep them till the bitter end, no matter what, because we will find a way to help them succeed."


Most charters are an expression of the same old belief system that has always marred the face of US public education-- there are some students who we believe in and some we don't. Charters just have the opportunity to gather only the students they believe in. That does not necessarily make charters evil or venal or dastardly, but it does mean that they have nothing to teach public schools, which must take all comers all year, about success and believing in students.

So when I say I'm not impressed by your story of charter success, I'm not saying that I don't believe that your students couldn't succeed or even didn't succeed. I am saying that 1) I have no reason to believe they wouldn't have been just as successful in a public school and 2) that there's very little that you've done in your charter school that is any help to me in a public school, where I will take any student at any time. And if I seem angry, I'm angry on behalf of all the other students that you abandoned in public schools where they must now make do with fewer resources because money and resources were stripped for the select few chosen for charterdom.

Belief is also a problem when it's used as an excuse to ignore the nuts and bolts of education. When belief becomes the linchpin of an argument that says, "You don't need money or a roof that doesn't leak or current textbooks for every single student or enrichment programs or a functional gym or the best administrators we have in the system or the best resources that money can buy-- you just need teachers who believe in those kids."

Do students in poor, minority schools deserve and need teachers who believe in them, in their promise, in their ability, in their potential? Absolutely. Is that the only thing they need? Absolutely not. Find me a rich white school in the 'burbs where the parents say, "Yeah, let's not spend any money on resources or upkeep for the school. Our kids have teachers who believe in them, so they don't need to have anything else at all."

For politicians and policymakers to say, "Yes, we believe in these young people, and that's why we're not going to fully fund their school," is a shameless crock. I'm in Pennsylvania, where the state government leads the nation in making school districts depend on local taxpayers for the bulk of school funding. This has had the predictable effect of making schools in poor areas poor. Belief is important and fundamental and essential, but the students of our poor districts also need resources, tools, a means of attracting and retaining top teaching talent. If politicians want to show how much they believe in the potential of young people, they need to put their money where their mouths are.

Belief is essential. Faith is great. But faith without works is a hollow, empty exercise.

That's because belief has limits. There's a point at which believing in a student goes past the point of being supportive and turns into being abusive. Good teachers try to find that balance every day. If I don't ask enough of a student, I have failed that student. But if I demand more than the student can give, I have also failed that student. There are hundreds of reasons not to believe in students, and they are all wrong and inexcusable. But it is also inexcusable to expect students to leap great barriers without help, support or guidance, just because we expect them to. Believing in the student means the whole student, including her challenges. We cannot overcome what we refuse to acknowledge, but we also can't overcome what we see as insurmountable. This is a hugely difficult balance, and it's here, more than anywhere else in the ongoing debate, we seem to find people refusing to acknowledge the difficulty and importance of this balance. Not all SPED students are placed because of institutional bias and lies, and not all of them are placed because they should be.

This, I think, is one of the reasons that we need more teachers who are rooted in the community where they teach. To actually teach a student, it's not just enough to believe in that student's ability and potential-- you have to be able to understand their world, their life, their background, their culture well enough to see past all of that to where their potential lies and what odds and ends it's hiding behind. This is why the theory of "Let's just move the effective teachers around" strikes me as a waste. I'm pretty effective where I am, but where I am is where I grew up-- I know the territory, I know the background, I know the culture. Transplant me to inner-city Philly, and I would be far less effective. I wouldn't believe in the students any less, but my ignorance of the neighborhood, the families, the culture would all be real deficiencies in me as a teacher and would stand in the way of my ability find connections between student potential and the world they want to enter. I would do my damnedest to learn what I needed to learn, to listen and watch and try to understand and overcome my ignorance, but I doubt that I could ever raise my game to the level of a teacher who has lived there for decades

There are other challenges with belief in the modern reformster era. We need, for instance, measures of student achievement broad enough to encompass all the many ways in which students can achieve. Saying "student achievement" when we mean "student scores on a narrow standardized math and reading test" is disingenuous, and grossly unfair to the students whose awesomeness lies in places other than standardized test taking.

And yes, teachers get testy and defensive when they are confronted with what amounts to the accusation, "Your students failed because you didn't believe in them," as if there isn't any other possible explanation. Blaming the player (We lost the game because you didn't want it enough) is sometimes the truth, but sometimes it's the first and last resort of the bad coach.

And the area where we will probably never find large-scale consensus is in the question of how student potential is affected by student circumstances. Do the most challenging circumstances actually change a child's potential, or do they just lock that potential away behind harder-to-breach barriers? How do we navigate the area between what the child can achieve and what the child will achieve?

I do agree with the core assertion-- teachers must believe that all students can achieve. It is hugely hard to do for every single student, but it's necessary. I know teachers who fail at it occasionally and teachers whose daily failure to believe in their students is the surest sign that they should get out of the teaching biz. But using "belief" as a rhetorical bludgeon or an excuse to sit on your hands does not help us move education forward.