Teachers' View of Growing Problems of Teaching

Back in May, the Center on Education Policy (located at George Washington University) released their report Listen To Us: Teacher Views and Voices. You may have missed the report because it didn't lend itself to any zippy coverage or grabby sound bite. If you are an actual teacher, virtually nothing in the results will make you go, "Wow! I had no idea!" The Center's own press release ("Demands of Teaching Taking Its Toll on Teachers") went with the story that here's some research showing the impact of reformy stuff and a possible explanation for why the teacher pipeline is drying up (and yes, it also included a usage error in the headline).

The surveys were completed by over 3,000 teachers (the Center bribed them with the chance to win a $500 Amazon card) with a distribution among subcategories by location and income pretty well matching the larger teacher population. There's a whole appendix on methodology that you can consult.

Again-- there are no huge shockers here, but let's check out some of the results. The charts below are all taken from the CEP report.

Teachers become teachers for mostly altruistic reasons. A non-zero number get in for the money. Hmm.

The rewarding part of teaching? 82% said "making a difference in students' lives." No big numbers for "seeing students get good score on Big Standardized Test."

What do teachers see as the big challenge?

Notice the lack of career ladder ( a favorite feature for reformsters to "fix") doesn't rank all that high, and "I don't have challenges" was below 1%. Of those who picked "addressing needs of economically disadvantaged students," they broke those down with 42% saying emotional needs and 40% saying academic needs.

How about job satisfaction?

60% found themselves less enthusiastic? Ouch. And about half would get out if you offered them a higher-paying job. That is a bigger number than I would have predicted.

Respondents were asked what would help with their day to day work. More planning time, smaller classes, and more collaboration time with colleagues topped that list. Curricula that is better aligned to state standards was only selected by 7% of the teachers responding (and teachers could select up to three items on the list).

How about the actual weight of teacher voices?

The researchers correlated this with the previous set of responses (1-C) with predictable results-- the less heard teachers tended to be the less happy teachers, though the correlation is not quite as strong as you might expect.

The survey asked how prepared teachers had felt to enter a classroom. Novice teachers were far more confident that their preparation had prepared them to teach, which means that either teacher prep programs are better than they used to be, or novice teachers are cockier than they used to be. Take your pick!

A series of questions asked about teacher collaboration, which many teachers value but which more often happens in informal, unofficial ways.

Another set of questions asked middle and high school teachers to consider college and career ready skills-- what they think they are, and whether or not their school addresses them. Here:

From which we can determine, if nothing else, that teacher ideas about curriculum values are not veryn influential in their schools.

Next, the survey addressed math and E:LA teachers specifically regarding the standards in their state. There were some curious findings here-

* About two-thirds of teachers said their autonomy had remained the same or increased under state standards-- though "autonomy" was defined as collaborating with other teachers, determining instructional strategies, or developing curriculum.
* They are using materials and curricula from all over the map
* The majority say they are using results from spring tests to modify their instruction in some way
* More than half don't know if the standards will be dumped or changed soon.

And yet, if we ask about autonomy in other ways, we find this:

So, not so much autonomy.

Then the survey went on to ask teachers of Everything Else about the standards and how CCR stuff affected their classroom. The findings:

* About half those other teachers say they are teaching some CCR standards as laid out by the state, but hardly any changed anything they do in class. In other words, rewrite the paperwork for your curriculum so that the same stuff you have always done now "matches" the standards.
* About half the teachers see the test results. Few use those test results to change instructoin.


Next, the report looked at testing time.

Much to nobody's surprise, 81% of the teachers said that they spend too much time on district and state mandated tests. Actually, I'm a little surprised that a whole 16% said there wasn't enough time. A majority of teachers also said they spend too much time preparing for the tests.

When asked what tests to keep or jettison:

Finally, the survey asked about teacher evaluation.

Most teachers reported having test scores used in their evaluation. Most received feedback about their evaluation, but only half found that feedback actually helpful.

There are more charts and details in the actual report, and it all gives a picture of why, for instance, the teacher pipeline is drying up. It's not an earth-shattering report, but it does offer some insights as well as some data for people who want data points for their arguments.

To Lounge or Not To Lounge: The Venting Question

Most beginning teachers have heard the advice-- stay out of the lounge.

That advice has been echoing around the internet for the last month or so, as exemplified by pieces like this one at Edutopia. The concerns is that lounges are where the negative teachers collect, where all that venting about the terrible students occurs.

Should teachers vent? Well, I would be a spectacular hypocrite to say no, sitting here and typing away at what is essentially my personal venting project. So, yeah-- teachers should totally vent.

But there is venting, and there is venting.

Look, if you don't find teaching occasionally frustrating, you're probably not doing it right. And anti-venters sometimes forget that public school teachers work with the entire range of human behavior. Think about the worst person you know, the worst person you've ever read about in the news. That person was, at some point, a child in some teacher's classroom. Some teacher had to deal with the younger version of that awful person.

The one reliable way to never be frustrated in a classroom is to not care what happens. That is not a good sign about a teacher's professional swellness.

But it's also not a good sign if all of the venting is in the form of blaming. There is a difference between "I am going to tear all of my hair out trying to get through to my third period class" and "My third period students are so stupid that there's just no point. Jesus could not teach those morons."

There is a problem if venting takes the form of "othering" students. Any venting that slaps a dehumanizing label on a students is a bad sign. This can be tricky for outsiders, because while there are proper professional terms for a students who faces certain cognitive and processing challenges, or a student who has problem reading and responding properly to social cues and who demonstrates a need to develop some non-cognitive skills, our culture has handy short-hand terms for people with such issues. In other words, when a teacher uses words like "dumb" or "jerk" in a lounge, she doesn't necessarily mean what a civilian means by those terms.

As shades-of-grey as some of this can be, I nevertheless believe in drawing a hard line at othering labels. If a teacher is dealing with stress and frustration by reducing students to something other than people (It's not me-- I just have a big roomful of dummies), then we have a problem.

The other factor is time and repetition. There are going to be days that you might feel a level of frustration, anger, hurt, despair beyond anything you usually feel, and you will say things that, a day later, you would gladly take back. But if someone is bitching and moaning day after day after day, then we have a problem.

To look at from another angle-- sometimes what comes out when someone "vents" is a momentary thought or fleeting reaction, and sometimes a "vent" reveals a more deep-seated and problematic attitude. The first can be an opportunity for sharing, support and problem-solving, while the second can be a sign of trouble and a source of spreading morale rot. The first is necessary for revealing and understanding issues in order to deal with them, while the second is just an excuse for meanness.

I'm a big believer that there's no issue that can't be discussed or spoken about, but I'm also a big believer that being unkind is always a bad thing. Be blunt, be clear, be direct, even be harsh-- but never forget that you are talking about actual human beings with lives and feelings of their own, and that you are supposed to be the professional charged with watching out for the interests of that small human.

Another NYC Integration Story

This week in Slate, Laura Moser covers yet another flap in New York City centered on schools, race and class.

I generally try to stay away from NYC education stories, because I find the politics of the city, district and union to be absolutely headache-inducing. But there are two elements in this story that are familiar to residents of many cities.

First, the well-regarded school at the center of the story, P.S. 452, has enrollment that does not reflect its neighborhood-- the school population is more white, more wealthy than the area housing the school. (13% of students at the school qualify for free lunch, while 48% of the district is low-income).

Second, because the school is overcrowded (it was originally opened to relieve overcrowding in another popular school), there's a proposal on the table to move it to a larger building. But that building is sixteen blocks south, next to large housing projects.

"Well, now, wait," say a whole bunch of parents. "We bough pricey homes to be near this great school."

Nobody yet quoted in a story has yet actually said, "But that would mean my child would go to school next to, and maybe even with, Those People." But, gosh, there does seem to be a bit of a subtext here. Yes, NYC has some of the most segregated schools in the country, but, said one parent as quoted by Chalkbeat, “Why do we have to fix that issue for the whole district?”

The mayor's office is not exactly running at integration with great fervor. Also from Chalkbeat:

The mayor has expressed support for school diversity, but he also has said the city must respect parents’ real-estate investments (a statement that at least one P.S. 452 parent repeated this week), while Chancellor Carmen Fariña has warned against forcing integration “down people’s throats.”

Moser's reaction to Farina's quote is pretty blunt:

Fariña’s line about forcing integration down people’s throats is almost laughable, for what else is the whole history of integration in this country but one of force-feeding, often in the form of landmark Supreme Court decisions?

I might go a step further and note that segregation has pretty much always been forced down people's throats. The difference is whose throats are involved. Segregation, whether we're talking about the explicit segregation of Jim Crow laws in the South or the implicit segregation of cities like Chicago where Blacks were forced into certain neighborhood for housing-- segregation has always forced down the throats of non-white, non-wealthy citizens, where as integration is generally forced down the throat of white folks.

Look, integration is complicated, and people who are pro-integration can make the mistake of treating Black children like props-- let's get some Black kids in our school so we won't look so racisty, or I hear there's some research that says our kids will do better if they have some non-white kids sitting next to them. Community schools are great-- except when they're used as a tool for short-changing one particular group of students.

So maybe even better than making integration a goal is to set a goal that all citizens' voices are heard, all citizens' needs are considered, and all students are viewed as deserving quality education.

After all, the underlying assumptions of integration are often not good:

* Some schools are going to be good and some are going to suck, so it's only fair that students of all races and backgrounds have access to the good ones.

* We are only going to try to make schools decent if there are white kids in them, so let's put some white kids in each of the schools so that each of the schools will get the attention and support it needs.

Either of these problems could be better solved by a resolve to make all schools good schools. I'm not a fan of integration if we are proposing it instead of trying to make all schools great schools.

On the other hand, integration makes supreme sense if we are saying, "Schools should look like our country, our society and our communities, and none of those things are monochromatic any more. You are going to grow up to live in a world of many cultures and many backgrounds, and you might as well start getting a handle on that from the first day you go to school."

That strikes me as far more productive than, "I bought an expensive house on the upper west side precisely so my child could grow up without knowing that Those People even exist. How dare you threaten my bubble."

ICYMI: Get a Comfy Chair

Maybe it's because it's summer and I often have larger stretches for reading. But once again, I have lots of good reads for you from the last week.

The Disconnect Between Changing Test Scores and Changing Later Life Outcomes Strikes Again

You may or may not be familiar with Jay Greene, who generally works the reformy side of the street. But he is one of those reformers who's not afraid to call BS when he sees it, and these days he is seriously challenging the assumption that raising test scores actually accomplishes anything. This is one of most important reads of the month.

A Void in Oversight of Charters

Wendy Lecker takes a look at just how messy the lack of charter oversight gets in Connecticut.

Promise Me

Kate With Keyboard writes a heartfelt open letter to the parents of her students as she sends those students home for the summer.

The Upper West Side Is New York's Latest Integration Battleground

Laura Moser at Slate looks at one more new battle over integration

On Latinos Education in America

Speaking of things we don't speak much about

Why Denver Is a Warning Sign, Not a Model

Man, do I ever appreciate people like Jeff Bryant who do actual journalism. A look at how the Denver model is to be feared, not imitated.

How To Cheat Good

One of the great things about the internet is that you can stumble across old friends here. I first read this essay years ago, and I still love it. A classic for anyone who deals with student papers.

Dr Steve Perry Sells Black Kids to the Highest Bidder

Jose Vilson reacts to Perry's proud announcement that he got a bunch of black kids to make themselves look less "black." Read this, and then read Vilson's follow-up piece here.


Feeding the Sparks of Revolution in Chicago

Xian Franzinger Barrett gives us a look at student activists on the ground in Chicago, where students now have to fight for their own educational future

Surviving Success Academy

Do you have time for one more horror story from a teacher who escaped working for Success Academy?

Call It a Racism Tax

Bob Braun and how New Jersey taxpayers are paying more just so they can keep all those black kids away.

How We Pervert Compassion in Schools

Empathy is helpful, but pity-- not so much.


Major: Debt

Jennifer Berkshire talks to writer Neil Swidey, who provides some powerful argument against the idea that a college education is the path out of poverty.

Pearson's Cyber-Kindergarten Sales Pitch

So I stumbled across the Connections Academy blog Virtual Learning Connections (a friendly resource supporting K-12 school from home). In particular, I stumbled across this post-- "5 Reasons Why Parents Choose Virtual School Kindergarten." The piece is written by Carrie Zopf, a teacher at one of the Conections Academies. Connection Academy is the virtual charter chain purchased by Pearson in 2011, and they would love to just hook your five year old up to a screen. And it is from way back in 2014, but it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

 It's a great little listicle, combining the sales pitch with the "everybody's doing it and here's why" peer reinforcement. So what are these five great reasons to put your child in virtual kindergarten?

It's easy!! You can have breakfast and then walk into the next room and plunk your child down in front of the computer! Or go to the store and then plunk. More family time, more adaptability to your schedule. More like not actually sending your child to school at all.

Frequent parent-teacher communication. Though Zopf says this is "much like in a traditional school," talking to your child's teachers is super-easy! And since all the learning is online, you can see everything right there. In fact, you can see everything the teacher can see. Plus you actually have the live child there with you. Actually, why would you even need to talk to the teacher. What is the teacher even doing?

Active participation. You can get right in there and help, because you can see every lesson, see every assignment. When your child is trying to work through worksheets assignments, you'll be right there. Right there. Boy, I hope you have some educational training. I also hope that you have the self-control and toughness not to just feed your child the answer when she gets frustrated. Zopf notes that being involved in the child's education is the primary reason that parents go this route.

Real world learning opportunities. Cyber-k still has field trips and stuff, so your child will still get out in the world and occasionally interact with her "classmates." Also, your five year old can sign up for a foreign language.

A safe learning environment. Your child doesn't have to go out into the big scary world. According to Conection's own parent survey, keeping their child safe and in the home was a major motivator for parents. So if you are the biggest helicopter parent ever, cyber school is a good choice for you.

Zopf also cites a study that suggests that small children are great at figuring out "unusual machines," though she completely skips the issue of screen time for children and the controversies around reading comprehension and computers. There's also an app to help you obsess over academic skills while your toddler is still toddling.

You can check out the broad outlines of Connections' cyber-K curriculum here. It's not very encouraging, though that may because I'm an old fart who recognizes this curriculum for five-year-olds as what we used to do with six or seven year olds. It's times like this that I think I just don't know what I'd do if I were raising a tiny human.

Charter vs. Charter Fight Heats Up

K12 Inc is feeling grumpy.

Earlier this week we looked at a report co-created by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50CAN in which the bricks and mortar wing of the charter school industry took the cyber-charters to task for stinking up the whole charter sector, and very helpfully offered some advice that involved a whole lot of restrictions and rules that cyber charters should have to follow.

It did not take long for the cyber charter industry to fire back.

K12 Inc, one of the very largest cyber chains. It was founded by banker and McKinsey alum  Ronald Packer and got its initial stake from Michael and Lowell Milken (Michael is famous as the junk bond king who went to prison for fraud) and also a chunk of change from Andrew Tisch, big cheese at Loewe's (his wife served on the reformy Center for Education Innovation board and opened an all-girls school in Harlem in the late nineties). In addition to running their own cyber-empire, K12 has also been the force behind spectacular cyber-failures like the Agora cyber charter chain. Oh, and they are fully unabashedly for profit, like most of the cyber charters.

K12 Inc did not much care for the Cyber Shape-Up report, and they issued a press release to say so.

"Not collaborative," they say of the report. Nobody invited cyber-charters to come participate in the scolding of cyber-charters. Speaking for most public school teachers of the last decade, let me just express our sympathy for how annoying it is when people want to attack your work without even talking to you.

K12 also attacks the study that is most of the basis for the scolding of cybers because the data is old and doesn't include points that the cybers think are important (like why the student left her original school). K12 claims that at least one cyber school in Ohio is had some really good data a year ago. So there's that.

"Most troubling" is the reports call for an end to open admissions. The report suggested that only students who demonstrated the factors linked to cyber-school success (self-motivation, involved parents) be allowed to enroll. But K12 argues forcefully for open enrollment with the usual bogus claim to being public schools.

They should be open to all eligible families and every child should be treated equally. Policies that restrict parent choice, or create perverse incentives for schools to turn away at-risk children or others deemed not to likely to succeed, should be rejected.  They have no place in the school choice movement.

Actually, I agree with all of that-- and it's a nice shot from K12 at the brick-and-mortar schools that with few exceptions do take steps to control exactly who gets into them, from the Got To Go lists of Success Academy to them many cities where only actively involved and motivated parents can hope to navigate the "lottery" process.

K12 argues that many students "fleeing" their public school have no other choice but cybers, which underlines that cybers have been a great way in states like mine to extend charter reach into markets that could never sustain a brick-and-mortar charter. It also sidesteps the larger issue of what a lousy job cybers actually do for those students. But never mind-- charters want to make sure they can pack students in.

In fact, packing them in is the business model, as well as packing in lots of at-risk students who don't expect much form school (and remember-- you only have to keep them on the rolls until counting day). In fact, K12 is a bold choice to speak up in defense of the cyber charter industry, because you can follow links to K12 horror stories all day (if you want to play that game, just start with the two articles linked in this paragraph).

K12 goes on to make their goose-and-gander point-- if the accountability measures advocated are good for cybers, then why not apply them to all charters? And at this point, K12 has smoothly slipped right past other issues raised by the report, like the gross overpayment of cybers.

But K12 is now reduced to the vaguest and thinnest of defenses-- we work hard For The Children, and we are totally working hard to "meet these challenges." Also, look at all the teachers we have employe4d, jobs we have created, and students we have shoved through graduated.

It's pretty weak sauce, but it does signal that the cyber-charter industry is not just going to knuckle under their bricks-and-mortar brethren, nor are they going to 'fess up to their increasingly obvious failures. But if they are going to just keep stinking up the charter school business, the bricks-and-mortar charters will just have to come after them with a bigger stick. I would just settle back with my bag of popcorn, were it not for all the real, live students who will continue to be collateral damage in the cyber-battle to keep a bad business model afloat just so some rich guys can get richer.

Bill Gates & His Chickens

Bill Gates believes in chickens.

He took to one of his blogs to extol the virtues of chickens as engines of economic improvement for the Very Poor of the world. In fact, he's pretty sure that the Poor Folks should be raising chickens; he's pretty sure it's their path to a better world.

When I was growing up, chickens weren’t something you studied, they were something you made silly jokes about. It has been eye-opening for me to learn what a difference they can make in the fight against poverty. It sounds funny, but I mean it when I say that I am excited about chickens.

Well, no. It sounds funny if you are a lifetime privileged rich white guy who occasionally takes little philanthro-tourist trips to Poorville. "Look, Melinda! They really do eat some of these things. And-- goodness-- I don't think they have any running water here! Imagine!!" Yes, life is rough in Poorville. It's almost enough to make a person wonder why poor people choose to be poor!

So Gates decided to give chickens to the Very Poor of the world. I found that an interesting logistical issue. Where does one get hundreds of thousands of chickens? How does one ship them all around the world? How does one distribute them when they get there? How will the Very Poor, who have trouble feeding themselves, feed the chickens? I'm curious about how this will actually work.

But the government of Bolivia isn't curious. It's pissed off.

As initially reported by Reuters and as picked up by every news outlet that wanted to A) poke fun at Bill Gates and B) wring some kind of hilarious headline out of the story, the Bolivian government revealed itself to have a little local pride:

"How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?" Bolivian Development Minister Cesar Cocarico told journalists. "Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia." 

Bolivia's agricultural department says that the country produces 197 million chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivia's economy has almost tripled in strength in recent years, though Forbes says the country has a lower GDP than every state except Vermont.

No other chicken recipients have rejected Gates' offer, but the Bolivia flap underlines again the problem with the Bill Gates approach to fixing the world-- decide what other lesser people need, and spend a bunch of money to get it to them. Go ahead and skip the part where you actually talk to them about how you could best help them. And don't look at any of the systemic reasons that they need any sorts of things in the first place.

I mean, I can't look into Bill Gates' heart. I don't know him. But I have to wonder-- when he's playing with things like chicken charities, does he ever consider with wonder or amazement or gratitude the circumstances that made him rich and other people poor, or does he just see that as how the cosmos administers justice to the deserving and the undeserving? Does he think, well, raising chickens is so economically responsible that even a rich guy like me should do it, and so he builds a chicken coop in the back yard and stops buying factory farmed chicken? Does he see the wall between himself and the less rich people of the world as a proper part of a just and orderly world, or does he contemplate how to knock that wall down.

And of course the chicken story evokes all the feels to those of us in education because it seems.... familiar. Kind of like the time Gates decided what the public education system needed without ever talking to the people who live and work there. Of course, we've been trying to tell him where to stick his chickens, but he hasn't listened to us, either.